‘Big Brother 26’s’ Kenney: Evicting me was ‘the right decision’

Kenney Kelley finally got his wish on “Big Brother 26.” The former cop had been wanting to go home since, well, the first week. He’s been on the block all three weeks and the third time is the charm because he was evicted 10-1 Thursday over Quinn, America’s replacement nominee, after the house’s consensus target, Tucker, won the AI Arena.

“I am super excited to see my family. It’s been a long time. I’ve never been away from my family this long with no contact whatsoever, so I am super excited to get home to my kids and my wife,” he tells Gold Derby (watch above). “The weeks are very long in the ‘Big Brother’ house. Some days you have bad days and you really wanna go home really badly. Some days you wanna compete and stay in the game and work your alliance. So it was a balance. Some of my closest houseguests in the house would be like, ‘Kenney, you having a good day today? Or are you having a bad day?’ And I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m having a good day.’ ‘OK, good.’ There were a lot of people in the house that wanted me to stay, I believe, especially if I was up there against Quinn. But it was tough being in the house.”

While Kenney spent much of the past three weeks talking about wanting to go home and oftentimes outright telling his fellow houseguests to vote him out, he doesn’t think his homesickness was the reason why they booted him. The lone dissenting vote was Tucker.

SEE ‘Big Brother 26’s’ Lisa on her eviction: ‘Shellshocked is an understatement’

“At the end of the day, they made the right decision. And they didn’t make the decision because they think that I was missing home. They knew I was a competitor. I was second in almost every competition if I didn’t win it,” he says. “I destroyed the Veto competition and no one came close to beating me. So they knew I was a physical threat, I could put puzzles together, I could figure out the difficult competitions. Those were the whispers in the house too: ‘Yeah, we know Kenney wants to go home, but keep in mind he can win competitions and he’s gonna be dangerous.’ And they all knew. Everyone was fearing going on the block if I was HOH.”

After the AI Arena, Kenney wasn’t sure if he would be evicted or Quinn, who has a power himself to take over an HOH. Tucker exposed Quinn’s power this week, but Kenney doesn’t think it’s a mistake to keep Quinn because he doesn’t think he’d use his power, which expires after Week 4.

“Putting three people on the block is a pretty tall task. And if he has to put three people up — he’s pretty much aligned himself with everybody in the house, so he’s gonna have a lot of explaining to do if he has to put three people up and possibly a fourth,” Kenney says. “So that’s a huge game-changer and that power is not as powerful as I think you would think, especially if you’re in the house and you know the relationships that are going on.”

PREDICT Who will win ‘Big Brother’?

Be sure to make your predictions to influence our reality TV racetrack odds. You can keep changing your predictions until just before the eviction episode airs live on CBS. You’ll compete to win a $100 Amazon gift card and a spot on our “BB26” leaderboard. See our contest rules and sound off with other fans in our reality TV forum. Read more Gold Derby entertainment news.