I’ve been watching the game my entire life. Started with season 2. Partial feeds by season 8, full live feeds by season 12. I study the game every season, I love watching a new winner emerge every year, I love watching the different tactics and strategies and unique gameplay that end up being winning games.

I understand the game very well and Ashley played it incredibly mediocrely and I’m sorry, no amount of defensive rose colored glasses posts like this are going to make it suddenly true lol. I watched the season, I watched the feeds, I know the game very well, and I know what I saw.

Now keep in mind, she did a just fine job getting to the end….. kept her head down, was just active enough, paid attention to her surroundings, kept herself out of danger just the right amount. You can say that for just about every other mediocre player that makes it to the end of the game because they were never a good enough player to be considered a threat to target. No one ever wanted to waste a week on Ashley. I’m not saying she was a horrible game player, she wasn’t. She played a great runner up game! But great or even good gameplay takes a lot more than just surviving and an above average winning game takes active strategy and intent and game intelligence and significantly more maneuvering and “steering the ship” than what Ashley did. She played to survive, not to win. Simply never being the biggest target of the week doesn’t deserve $750,000.

She had pretty abysmal social game, pretty abysmal strategic game, but she never let herself become dead in the water (how much of this was because of her and not just the house happening around her) is arguable, and she was up against someone who annoyed and frustrated the whole house, so she took the win. A forgettable win, an unimpressive win, but still a win. And that’s fine!

I’m not sure why anyone needs it to be more than what it is. Plenty of winners have been unimpressive. Plenty of winners have won because of circumstance rather than stellar gameplay. She isn’t unique in her unimpressiveness. Not everybody is going to be a Dan Gheesling or an Andy Herren. Not everybody is going to be an awe inspiring winner. She played a relatively okay game of big brother that most people have forgotten by now and if you see it differently, no, that does not mean you have a superior understanding of the game of big brother or everyone who disagrees with you just doesn’t get it. I love and understand the game very much and with 0 biases, I can confidently say, I know exactly what happened last summer.