So Rick Dutrow, trainer of expected Kentucky Derby favorite Big Brown, feels that “this is not a tough horse race?” Let me assure him that he is dead wrong.

In case you missed it, Dutrow sounded cockier than Foghorn Leghorn in an interview with the Daily Racing Form published over the weekend:

"Until somebody shows me the beast, this is not a tough horse race," he was quoted as saying. "I'm training this horse for a horse race; I don't care what the name of it is. I feel he's the best horse in the race — I feel he's going to win the race. Anything else is going to be extremely disappointing to me.

"I know there's no one going into this race as good as he is right now. If he breaks clean, it's a mismatch to me on paper."

Maybe Dutrow, who will be saddling his first Derby starter when he sends Big Brown to post on Saturday, should consider spending a few minutes with Bobby Frankel discussing how confident the Hall of Famer was when he saddled favored Empire Maker in 2003.

Or perhaps he could exchange a few well-chosen words with Bob Baffert and Gary Stevens about how much they liked Point Given when he went to post as the 9-5 favorite in the 2001 Derby.

Or, when he arrives at Churchill Downs, he could just saunter a few barns over and ask Louis Roussel  how he felt going into the 1988 Derby with Risen Star.

Needless to say, any of those conversations might be enough to give even the supremely confident Dutrow pause, as all those highly regarded horses fell short on the first Saturday in May.

What, me worry?
I actually like Dutrow’s mindset.  He has one horse to look after and — on paper — Big Brown looks to be the best horse in the race. So why put additional pressure on yourself by worrying about all the things that can go wrong before and during the race. This way, all he has to do is get the Florida Derby winner to Churchill Downs without stitches and then pray that nothing happens in the last five days before the race.

But for the rest of us, the 134^th Run for the Roses has more questions than a 4-year-old who got into Daddy’s No-Doze.  And believe me, “Why is the sky blue?” and “Why do we have to die?” will seem like pieces of cake if you can reason your way through this puzzle and come up with a horse you can confidently back. Here’s why:

• Yes, Big Brown has shown more this year than any other horse in the field. His victory in the Florida Derby, when he had to break from the extremely disadvantageous outside post and still trounced his rivals, was something to behold. But 1915 was a long time ago, and that’s the last time a horse won the Derby off just three career starts. And last time I checked, that’s exactly how many times Big Brown has run.
• The likely second choice in the Derby, the consistent and relatively seasoned Colonel John, has never – that’s right, never – raced on a dirt racetrack. He’ll do so on Saturday, and could just as well finish first or 20^th. Or perhaps you’d rather wager on Cowboy Cal or Adriano, graded stakes winners who have raced horribly the only time they ever tried running on dirt?
• Many of the other horses that a handicapper could make a case for — stakes winners like Pyro, Denis Of Cork , Visionaire and Big Truck — are coming into the Derby off terrible efforts. And many of them laid their eggs in the very same race, the Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland, run on the quirky Polytrack surface. Was the track to blame, or are they regressing at just the wrong time?
• On the flip side, horses who had struggled in their previous starts — Tale of Ekati, Monba and Z Fortune, to name three — bounced back to run huge races in their final starts before the Derby. Will they be able to duplicate those efforts in Louisville or will they regress off those lifetime best efforts?
• Or maybe you’d rather root for the filly Eight Belles, who will face the boys for the first time if she runs in the Derby rather than the Kentucky Oaks a day earlier, as looks increasingly likely. Her speed figures suggest she should be competitive, but mightn’t she get intimidated in the 20-horse traveling mosh pit that is the Kentucky Derby?

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