Jimbo,
I understand that the only way you can make yourself feel better at this point is to put names to your strawmen and try to beat on them, but for the third time, I have already agreed that the first half of Oaks card was speed favoring, and then suggested you should go back and actually watch the last 4 dirt races that day instead of using what happened earlier in the day to bias your opinion. You apparently still have not done that, because to argue that a speed bias existed in those 4 races is impossible to do.

And I never made any comments about Saturday's track at all. But I get it, you need someone to beat on, so why not attach my name to some made up assertion I never made and call it out publicly to distract away from how ridiculous your pre-race comments were.

As for the "how can we improve next time" post-mortem....

I think pedigree still has to account for something. Not saying you base an entire opinion off it, but the name of the game is how fast is each horse going to run TODAY. When trying out new distances/surfaces, especially longer ones, simply taking a dogmatic view of who had the previously "fastest" figures without accounting for how the new conditions might impact their ability to run what they otherwise might seems to be missing key thought.

FrankD mentioned the "eye test" when it came to PJ not being able to get past Irap at 9F. That was more than just an "eye test". The pedigree data, avg winning dist etc, has always been there to suggest that this horse will be great at 8F, and might start diminishing as you move past that. The Bluegrass visual was a hint that the pedigree data was correct, and has been further validated with the performance yesterday and Brown's comments.

Sometimes these 3yr old races require an additional level creative thinking, not just dogmatic number reading, and that was the point Sekrah and FuriousPete went into detail about prior to the race. Another example I'll throw out is the last ROTW 3yr old stakes, the Ill Derby, since I commented on it prior to that race. The 2 "slowest" horses in the race ran 1-2. The pure TG figure read was to back a horse who figured to not be as good as the races got longer, and was heavily overraced during the winter. That didn't work out well their either.

Last comment... the seminar mentioned O'Neil horses and their out of Cali jumps. Have a look at Denman's Call from yesterday, they jump up in Cali as well. Though he did not burn us yesterday, there may not be a more frustrating trainer to have in a race at a major track right now because of the number of 5+ point jumps he throws out there.