During a recent voicemail segment on Rob Has a Podcast (RHAP), Rob Cesternino and Angie Caunce, discussed former-NBA player Scot Pollard’s performance so far in Survivor Kaoh Rong.
Specifically, they asked the question:
Is Scot Pollard the best big man to ever play survivor?
There’s been a number of rather tall men that have played Survivor:
- Mitchell Olson, Australian Outback – 7’0″
- Cliff Robinson, Cagayan – 6’10”
- Ian Rosenberger, Palau – 6’8″
- Steve Wright, Redemption Island – 6’6″
- Ken Stafford, Thailand – 6’5″
As well as a number of rather tall women:
- Crystal Cox, Gabon – 6’3″
- Sierra Thomas, Worlds Apart – 6’1″
- Amanda Kimmel, China – 5’11”
Survivor Kaoh Rong is only in week 5, so time will tell how great Scot’s game truly is, but Angie and Rob’s discussion did get me thinking about Survivor contestant’s height and their historical performance.
So, in this blog post I take a deep dive into figuring out who does the best on Survivor? Tall, average or short people?
Collecting the Data
In order to track these different segments of the Survivor population, I needed to first figure out how to collect everyone’s height. This was by far the most difficult part of this particular project.
There’s just not one place where you can find this information. The CBS bio’s don’t contain height, the Survivor Wiki doesn’t have it, and True Dork Times was a bust. I found a couple of random Reddit posts referencing height of certain contestants or perhaps the odd season, but nothing very reliable. I even considered attempting to use Photogrammetry to estimate people’s height from images but abandoned that approach when I couldn’t get reliable pictures with every contestant standing next to each other.
Eventually I did figure out a way to get not everyone’s height, but enough people for this experiment.
My first breakthrough was that I discovered that some people have their height listed on IMDB. I used the Survivor Cast page and wrote a custom crawler to walk through the cast pages and grab the height of anyone that had one listed. This got me about 65 different people’s height. But this only represents roughly 13% of the total Survivor population.
In addition to this, I was able to hand collect a number of player’s heights based on their profession. For example, if the person was a former athlete, model, or beauty queen then often their height was readily available. Also, player’s on the two extremes of the height spectrum, frequently had their height discussed on some web form that I could find.
My final idea was to use Mechanical Turk. I created a job on Mechanical Turk using my spreadsheet of Survivor contestants and offered a nickel to workers to find or guess the height of the contestants based on images. If at least two Mechanical Turk workers proposed a height that was within 1 inch of each other, I used that height in my calculations.
These three approaches yielded a total of 182 contestant heights (104 males and 78 females). Below I walk through my analysis of this data.
What is the average height of a Survivor contestant?
The average height of a U.S. male is 5’10” and the average height of a U.S. female is 5’4″. Based on the 104 male and 78 female heights, I calculated the following Survivor average heights:
- Average Male Survivor Height: 6’0″
- Average Female Survivor Height: 5’6″
Who plays the best? Short, average or tall players?
Using these groupings, I calculated the team performance, individual challenge performance, and average finish for contestants within that group. In these calculations, I only counted the first time a contestant played, discounting any repeat performances.
I first wanted to look at how does your height impact both your team and individual performance?
The chart below shows the average number of tribal team wins per height grouping. First looking at the men (red columns), the taller men appear to rack up a few more team wins than the shorter. On the female side, the trend appears to be a similar level of performance for both the shortest and tallest women.
Turning our attention to individual wins, we can see that on the men’s side the tallest men have the worst historical performance. There could be a number of factors, including their lack of longevity in the game, which we we will explore next.
The female performance tells a different story. The tallest women have the best individual challenge performance.
Finally, we can take a look at the average finish for each height category. The graph below displays this. A smaller number is better, meaning they were closer to winning.
We see that similar to individual female challenge performance, the extreme ends of the spectrum for female players on average have the best finish. For men, it’s clear that the shortest men fare the best for longevity in the game.
I believe to most Survivor fans, this will make some sense. Large athletic guys are useful early in the game for team challenges, but they are often targeted shortly after the merge because they are perceived as a challenge threat. The smaller guys are likely not as threatening, at least from an outward physical appearance point of view.
The tallest male players to win the game are Richard Hatch at 6’4″ and Aras Baskauskas at 6’3″. However, besides their impressive wins, there are many tall players that are pre-merge boots like Cliff Robinson and Mitchell Olson. These poor finishes really drive up the average.
On the female side, the tallest women to ever win are Kim Spradlin and Danni Boatwright, both standing 5’10”. In the data I collected, the only pre-merge boots for the tallest women are Francesca Hogi and Kimmi Kappenberg (although Kimmi came back and did well). There’s a lot to live up to if you are a 5’10” and above female that wants to play Survivor.
How good is Scot Pollard?
First, to be an above average big man, Scot Pollard will need to finish better than 8th place overall. However, to be the best player above 6’6″ that has ever played Survivor, he’ll need to finish better than Ian Rosenberger’s third place in Palau.
Those are some tough size 18 shoes to fill.
Final remarks
There’s of course a ton of factors that go into how well a Survivor contestant does at the game. This was just a fun experiment.
It’s important to remember the mantra that correlation does not imply causation. That is, even if there is a correlation between height and performance, it does not necessarily mean a person’s height is the cause of that performance.
Have any thoughts or questions, please leave a comment.
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