I guess I'll have to paint the contrarian view once again for the runaway freight train of praise I'm seeing for CC on twitter and other media.

People seem convinced that yesterday only strengthened the position that CC is far and away head and shoulders above the rest of this field, but I would suggest the opposite. The only thing yesterday did is completely call into question anything that happened in Arkansas this winter/spring, opening up the question of "who did Hoppertunity really beat in the Rebel?"

If you start to question Hoppertunity, you then in turn put more scrutiny on the question of "who has CC beat in Cali this year"? A question that currently is largely bolstered by Hoppertunity in many people's eyes, that I would argue looks less impressive the more you look at it.

Chitu beat absolutely NOTHING in the Sunland derby, unless you are going to make an argument that Bourbonize is a good horse by winning an undercard stakes yesterday where most of the horses were running between 7s-10s. We all see what Commissioner was/is.

And I won't even get into the topic of Bayern and the narrative of "world-beater at SA, good but not good-enough to win away from SA", as this provided yet another example. But that's ground we've been over before.

I find the irrational exuberance for CC downright amazing. It's as though solid handicappers and journalists that should know better thru experience have completely forgotten that visually impressive winners of Derby prep races fail in the Derby more often than they succeed.

No one seems to want to hear that there is a large cluster or horses all in the same ability range right now (at least on TG), and in a race so closely matched, it comes down to pace, trip, ability to get the distance, and ability to handle the surface type. This view is in direct conflict with the public view that seems to think CC is already at least 5 lengths better than everyone else. I guess I shouldn't complain, because it is going to create great value on everyone else.