There are a great many people who won’t agree with me on this one, but honestly, I don’t see how it’s any different. My “sport” is Survivor. It’s a game. People are eliminated. There are competitions between players. You can have your fantasy teams. And at the end of the season a winner takes all.

No one who watches sports actively do anything other than eat snacks and drink beer on game days, so it’s not as if the “sport” part of the equation means anything to those of us who aren’t participating. And if we are counting the amount of work contestants/players go through, they certainly go through a large amount of body-wreckage like your average sports player, including contracting infectious diseases that often-times wreck havoc on their bodies for years and years to come.

As for the game day rituals, yes! I’ve managed to coerce my family into liking Survivor (mhahaha) and we play a season-long game based on our guesses as to who is going home.

After episode one, we all choose one person as our winner pick who, if we managed to get it right, will be worth a massive amount of points.

Before every episode after the first, we each write down the boot order, from who we think is least likely to go home to who we think is most likely to go home. These are listed by order number. Then, at the end of the episode we circle the eliminated player on each person’s list and whatever placement that player was at is how many points we each get. Continue reading →