Introducing the Purple Rock Podcast’s Ultimate Survivor Winner Bracket, where you will vote on head to head match-ups to answer the question: who is the greatest Survivor winner of all-time?

Traditionally, our stance here at the Purple Rock Survivor Podcast is that comparing winners is a fool’s errand – so much of an individual win is subject to the conditions that formed it, and that there’s no one way to win the game. But we’re doing this anyway, because having fun is more important than avoiding hypocrisy.

For the next month or so, we’ll have weekly polls pitting former winners in head-to-head match-ups until we get from 32 down to 1. While we cannot tell you how to vote, the intention of this tournament is to judge winners by the season in which they won, not their collected body of work. So, for instance, Tina being the first boot of All-Stars should have nothing to do with how you evaluate her win in The Australian Outback, nor should Tyson voting himself out of Heroes vs Villains affect your opinion of his performance in Blood vs Water. Now, if you want to give someone more credit for winning on their first try than than their second, third, or fourth, that’s up to you. Same if you give someone more credit for beating returnees. But we hope people will be looking at each individual win as its own thing. (It’s all up to you, of course).

Putting together this bracket is incredibly simple: since all wins are their own thing, we did NO pre-tournament rankings. There is no seeding, because we didn’t want to introduce or own biases. The match-ups are determined only by chronology. That should lead to some interesting early match-ups and perhaps a more interesting end game.

The Sandra Diaz-Twine Play-in Game

There were only two issues in putting this bracket together:

1. You can’t do a tournament with 33 entries.
2. “Sandra is the Ultimate Winner ever because she did it twice” is boring (and a repeat of our original Ultimate Survivor Bracket).

The solution is simple: only one of Sandra’s victories will enter the bracket, after which we implore you to judge it as its own win, not one of a pair. Which Sandra win will make it? That’s up to you.

Voting ends on Tuesday, February 14th.

7. Sandra Diaz-Twine (Pearl Islands) vs 20. Sandra Diaz-Twine (Heroes vs Villains)

Sandra Diaz-Twine (Pearl Islands)

A loyal team player who didn’t care where the vote went as long as it wasn’t her, who proved her worth early in the season by being generally helpful around camp. This value combined with her tribe’s initial challenge dominance kept her safe in the early portion of the game, while playing under the radar and not being threatening kept her safe in the middle portion of the game when bigger threats were targeted. A shocking blindside of her main ally motivated her to exact revenge on the blindsiders, who happened to be the villains of the season. She managed to strike that defiant tone against the transgressors while still working with them throughout the end game of the season, thereby currying favour with future jury members who fell victim to those villains and staying out of the crosshairs of the shot callers. The lack of threat she posed combined with the general surly attitude she presented to the aggressors made her a tempting final tribal council opponent, only to find that the person she went to the finals with was far more disliked than she.

Sandra Diaz-Twine (Heroes vs Villains)

Holy shit, she did it again, but against All-Stars this time.