If you were to close your eyes and I asked you to picture the typical Survivor merge boot, what would you imagine? I’m sure most of you would think of a younger man, probably in good physical shape. The kind of guy you like having on your team for camp life and pre-merge challenges but instantly feel threatened by once the game becomes individualistic. Maybe somebody like a Joe Anglim even though he has somehow played twice and never been axed at the merge.

Should that be the kind of player you were picturing, you’re in the same boat as I am. When the cast bios for Survivor: Heroes vs Healers vs Hustlers came out, upon my first perusing, I was able to tag who I believed to be this season’s merge boot. As soon as my eyes laid upon Cole Medders, he jumped out to me as an obviously threatening young guy that has no shot at winning the game because of his looks.

To see if the numbers support the eye test, I decided to focus my next Survivor Statistics on the merge boots and find out what the numbers say. Coming from a sports background, you have to understand that while I trust my eyes to do some analysis, I like to support those views with actual facts.

Just before getting into the raw numbers, here are a few caveats that are worth mentioning:

a) I did not consider Tocantins, San Juan del Sur and Kaoh Rong to have “merge boots”. Tocantins and Kaoh Rong both had a player medically pulled from the game in their merge episode, thus never voting anybody out at the merge. San Juan del Sur’s merge coincided with Julie McGee’s quit and thus that cast also never had a vote at the merge.

b) To source my information for age at the time of filming, I used Wikipedia. The players’ jobs were taken from the Survivor wiki.

c) As for the list of recruits and applicants, I always refer to this list which has proven to be very accurate in the past.

Without further ado, let’s get to some number cracking.

Age and Gender

The typical merge boot has an average age of 30.80. The oldest, by a fair margin, is Amazon’s Roger Sexton who was 56. The youngest is a tie between Guatemala’s Brandon Bellinger and China’s Jaime Dugan, who were both 22. It’s actually a little hard to believe that the rope smashing monster known as Brandon was only 22 during his season.

Looking at the ages across a chart, there is a fairly obvious through-line if we kind of ignore the outliers whose ages are way higher than the rest.

In terms of gender, there have been 19 guys voted off at the merge in comparison to only 12 women. The first ever merge boot was Gretchen Cordy, in the one tribal outcome that can never be replicated, and it took until Fiji to have another woman leave at the merge. That vote was also a weird occurence where Michelle Yi only had half of the tribe available to play the game with at tribal council. That’s a stretch of 12 seasons where a man was sent home at the merge.

It should be noted that the average age for men who are merge boots is 30.81 while the women enjoy a perfectly rounded 30.

So in the early to middle era of Survivor, the “Joe Anglim” merge boot template seems to fit the bill. More recently, that seems to have gone a little by the way side because the last five merge boots have been women. It would be seven of the last eight with only Aras’ ouster in Blood vs Water stopping a possible eight season streak.

Recruited or Applied?

While evidence suggests Joe is an applicant, a generic merge boot might be thought of as a recruit. It’s one thing to understand the dynamics of how Survivor works at the ground level; you have two tribes, eventually you merge and then at the end, one remains. That’s the basic concept of the show.

Come the merge, the recruit might not understand how much the dynamics of the game shift from the team to the individual. Smart players have been playing their individual game and fitting it into the team’s plans as much as possible. A recruit who does not pick up on the incoming changes might simply have been thinking “team first” the whole way and have left himself open to being picked off at the merge if they’re too dangerous either socially or in challenges.

Looking at the numbers, we have 19 applicants who have gone home at the merge and 12 recruits. It’s worth mentioning that in the first 11 seasons, 10 of the merge boots have been applicants. Back then, the show relied much more heavily on their applicants and did not go out of their way to recruit like they do in more recent seasons.

Still, four of the last five most recent merge boots have been applicants. While the theory that recruits may become more vulnerable once the game becomes individualistic may be interesting, it isn’t necessarily supported simply based on the merge. One might have to dig deeper and look at the next couple of votes after the merge to really get an idea of how recruits handle the shift in the game.

Merge Boot Vote

Having looked at the kind of person that goes home at the merge, I also looked into the numbers that send these people home. As well, I looked at how often an idol comes into play for the one voted off. Considering the unsure circumstances surrounding a merge, where a bunch of people are suddenly thrown together on the same tribe, the number of idol plays that impacted the final result is surprisingly low.

Only three people have gone out at the merge because of an idol. Most infamously, J.T. in Heroes vs Villains when he ended up being sent home thanks to his own idol that he handed over to Russell Hantz. J.T. is also the only player whose vote-off was technically unanimous since all the votes going the other way got nullified.

“… damn it”.

The other two players to get idol-ed out of the game are RC Saint-Amour in Philippines and Kelly Remington in Worlds’ Apart. Kelly’s vote is interesting because it ended up being 5–1 against her but Kelly was not the “1” in question because she was part of the crowd whose vote got cancelled out. Because Will Sims threw in a “random” vote for Hali Ford (he was being tested on his faithfulness), it stopped the vote from being the second “unanimous” merge boot.

In terms of pure votes, Erik Cardona of Samoa, Alina Wilson of Nicaragua and Jonas Otsuji of One World share the honor of amassing the most at the merge with 10. Both went home in a 10–2 vote. This is partly to do with the growing jury and the addition of the final three pushing back the sheer number of people left around at the merge.

With Erik specifically, I found it incredibly interesting. This is because Samoa is one season where one of the tribes came in with a very dominating majority over the other. The Galus doubles the Foa Foas, 8–4. Still, the minority was able to convince the majority to start cannibalizing itself before even looking at Foa Foa as an easy first couple of votes.

The player who has gotten the least number of votes at the merge is the aforementioned Michelle Yi. Because only five players participated in her tribal council, she was sent home in a 3–2 vote. That somehow beats out Gretchen’s weird 4–1–1–1–1–1–1 vote. Only Gretchen and Cambodia’s Kass McQuillen (6–4–2–1) can say they were voted off at the merge without actually getting more than the majority’s share of the vote.

There have been two ties at the merge. the first was Jeff Varner and Colby Donaldson in Australian Outback. This was the moment that Colby and his alliance broke the “past votes” way of breaking ties and sent home Jeff because of his past. The second tie was in South Pacific with Savaii and Upolu entering the merge with even numbers. With the original vote tied at 6, John Cochran flipped on his team in the re-vote to avoid having to pick rocks.

Pre-Merge with the Winner?

Looking through the numbers, it became pretty obvious that the merge boot is usally just the tribe with the numbers choosing who to send home from the other side. That being side, it means that in theory, the winner should usually come from the side who did not suffer a merge casualty. To look at that, I checked which merge boots shared a tribe with a winner in the pre-merge.

Now this method isn’t perfect because it could be any sort of contact between merge boot and winner. For example, Aras Baskauskas and Nick Stansbury have shared a tribe, even if it was only for three days, I had to count it.

When I counted everything up, 16 winners had shared a tribe with the merge boot and 15 hadn’t. It was an almost shocking number considering but as I mentioned, it doesn’t take into account a tribe swap putting the two players at opposite ends of the field and one coming out on top.

It’s also fun to note that there have been two merge boots who went on to become winners and two merge boots who were former winners. Boston Rob and Sarah Lacina both were merge boots in their original seasons only to eventually go on and win (one in more attempts than the other). Aras and J.T. both took home the title of Sole Survivor only to come back and be sent home at the merge.

Conclusion

While there may have been a time where we could have pinpointed a typical merge boot, it looks like those times may be changing. Players may be realizing that there is plenty of time to take out the challenge threats and that sometimes the strategic or social players need to go first.

Still, the merge presents a very significant change in the game of Survivor and a time where a lot of people want to start playing hard. We can see that regardless of gender, the merge boot tends to fall in a very specific age range. We can also take away from this that merge votes are usually going to be very contentious where one person flipping could forever change the outcome of the season.