I'm watching Survivor: All-Stars and it's final Tribal Council... The Jury's overwhelming theme is "how can you separate 'the game' from 'the friendships involved'"
The theory being that, by and large, a lot of the people voted out were friends of Rob's who he backstabbed, etc., etc., in order to survive. Which, of course, begs the question: Can you, or even should you, separate the two in a competition like this?
The answer is a resounding yes. You have to separate the two. In baseball, A-Rod and Jeter were friends from way back. Does that mean they should have cut each other breaks when A-Rod was playing against the Yankees, back in the day? Hell no.
But you can say that baseball doesn't involve lying, deception, etc., and that's true. Maybe my years of playing Diplomacy have conditioned me to be able to differentiate between "the backstabbing that is part of the game" from "backstabbing in real life", and the ability to realize that they're radically different creatures. If you're playing Diplomacy against me, and you stab me in the back, that's part of the game, I'll congratulate you for an excellent deception. I'm looking to backstab you the same way and it's similar to a game of chicken, which one of us believed the usefulness of the other had come to pass first.
In that vein, I can't really fault Rob. If people who are playing a game where the central theme is "backstabbing people to get ahead", you need to have a thick skin and accept that you're going to get knifed in the back. You have to accept that you also need to be willing to use the dagger on occasion, yourself. If you can't, then you've got no place in that game.