Mark Stoops Blue-White Game

The transfer portal closes at midnight but the Wildcats’ work is far from finished. Kentucky is making a move for a defensive lineman who’s become a popular player over the last ten days.

Jay’viar Suggs is a 6-foot-3, 295-pound defensive lineman from Division II Grand Valley State. He entered the transfer portal on April 21 and has since received scholarship offers from 37 schools. Kentucky entered the mix over the weekend and made a significant impression early in the process.

A source tells KSR that the Wildcats are expected to host Suggs for an official visit. He recently completed a trip to Arkansas and has scheduled a visit to Florida State for this weekend.

Last year Suggs tallied 21 tackles, 7.5 tackles for loss, 5.0 sacks, and a forced fumble. A graduate transfer, Suggs has two years of eligibility remaining.

The strength of the Kentucky defense is the front seven. A stout run-stopping group, there’s plenty of talent up front on Brad White’s defense and a ton of depth in the trenches. That depth was pushed to the limit this spring. Kentucky was forced to take tackling out of the equation in the Blue-White Spring Game after the Wildcats suffered eight injuries on the defensive line. Even though Mark Stoops believes most of those players will be available once the season begins, Kentucky still feels the need to bring in reinforcements.

Kentucky already kicked the tires on one defensive lineman from outside of the FBS ranks. Brandon Lane was interested but never made it to campus, ultimately committing to Michigan State. The Cats are stepping up to the plate once again with Suggs in the hopes of adding another player from the portal this spring.

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Fierceness is coming into the Kentucky Derby with a 110 Beyer speed figure and a dominant 13-and-a-half length win in the Florida Derby, which are the nominal reasons that the Kentucky-bred colt is the morning line favorite. He’s a homebred for charmingly outspoken owner Mike Repole. Like all Derby contenders, Fierceness has never run at a mile-and-a-quarter distance, much less in a Grade 1 contest at that length, nor, like all Derby contenders, has he run in a Grade 1 with the fanfare and chaos that a Kentucky Derby crowd brings to its day.

On the plus side, there is no doubt that Fierceness has the distance in him. Immediately after his Florida Derby romp, owner Repole famously asked jockey John Velasquez what Fierceness had left in him, a deceptively simple, smart horsemanly question about the front-runner’s stamina after such a Secretariat-style performance. Velasquez bluntly responded: “I don’t know, but I didn’t use it all.”

But before we dive into the minutia of Fierceness’ past performances and his likes and dislikes, here, a field-and-morning line refresher:

(Post Position, Trainer, Jockey, Morning Line)

1. Dornoch, Danny Gargan, Luis Saez, 20-1

2. Sierra Leone, Chad Brown, Tyler Gaffalione, 3-1

3. Mystik Dan, Kenny McPeek, Brian Hernandez Jr., 20-1

4. Catching Freedom, Brad Cox, Flavien Prat, 8-1

5. Catalytic, Saffie Joseph Jr., Jose Ortiz, 30-1

6. Just Steel, D. Wayne Lukas, Keith Asmussen, 20-1

7. Honor Marie, Whit Beckman, Ben Curtis, 20-1

8. Just a Touch, Brad Cox, Florent Geroux, 10-1

9. Encino, Brad Cox, Axel Concepcion, 20-1

10. T O Password, Daisuke Takayanagi, Kazushi Kimura, 30-1

11. Forever Young, Yoshito Yahagi, Ryusei Sakai, 10-1

12. Track Phantom, Steve Asmussen, Joel Rosario, 20-1

13. West Saratoga, Larry Demeritte, Jesus Castanon, 50-1

14. Endlessly, Michael McCarthy, Umberto Rispoli, 30-1

15. Domestic Product, Chad Brown, Irad Ortiz Jr., 30-1

16. Grand Mo the First, Victor Barboza Jr., Emisael Jaramillo, 50-1

17. Fierceness, Todd Pletcher, John Velazquez, 5-2

18. Stronghold, Phil D’Amato, Antonio Fresu, 20-1

19. Resilience, Bill Mott, Junior Alvarado, 20-1

20. Society Man, Danny Gargan, Frankie Dettori, 50-1

(Source: Churchill Downs)

Of his five career races, Fierceness has rung up three outright wins, one third place in the Holy Bull in February (that both Repole and Pletcher discount because Fierceness was bumped), and a dismal 7th place performance in the 2023 Champagne Stakes last October. This sort of hill-and-dale past performance record is not uncommon in young horses, and it’s dangerous to over-interpret certain losses as racehorses are in the very teeth of their occasionally rocky maturation.

Trainer Todd Pletcher, who has had Repole’s horses in his care for a decade, is sanguine about that process. Known for his dry wit, the trainer recently quite publicly joked about Fierceness’ uneven record in an interview that “Sixty per cent of the time, he wins every time.”

Which is to say that Fierceness’ closest connections understand their athlete and are content with letting the athlete be himself, while at the same time trying to coax a certain steadiness out of him. Repole is a strong, even outspoken believer in the health of his racehorses and regularly speaks at length on X and directly with the industry press on the thorniest issues facing the sport, such as over-medication and post-career care. He noted in one comprehensive interview with Bloodhorse that Fierceness, being a homebred, is one of the healthiest horses that he’s ever had.

All that noted, Fierceness still has a job of work to do come Saturday, and although the run will remain the run, certain features of the contest will be entirely new for every horse in it. Pletcher notes that Fiercness’ two career losses are quite similar in that he was bumped in the Champagne and had a particularly rough go in the Holy Bull — or put another way, both those races were difficult for the horse in working his way through the traffic.

Unfortunately for Fierceness, precisely that traffic problem, in a Kentucky Derby, will be multiplied many times, since Derby fields are so huge — larger by an order of magnitude than any field that many of the runners have faced or will ever face. Put another way, this known, magnified difficulty of the Kentucky Derby’s meant for Repole and Pletcher that an outside post position was, to their thinking, critical for their colt’s ability to focus on his work by lessening the enormous Derby probability that he would get bumped, at least in the early stages of the chaos. When the Fierceness team drew the 17-hole on April 27 — a stall about as far to the outside as they could reasonably hope for, Mike Repole was immediately tracked down by a camera crew and noted, with more than a little relief etching his face, that stall 17’s poor record of Derby wins did not bother him because the greater positive was that the stall was so far outside.

Which very much does not mean that Fierceness’ traffic problems have been swept clear for him. In fact, traffic will remain a challenge, if not the challenge, for him as the race progresses. As a front-runner coming from far outside, he will, first, be wanting to have to have a brilliant, lightning quick start. Part of being a front-runner means that Fierceness doesn’t take back well or easily. He can be made to settle in a physical place-in-the-race sense, but the question for Fierceness is whether he can be settled enough mentally to not let the physical fact of settling, and then having to work up through traffic, dispirit him or otherwise disturb the great outpouring of energy a long horse race requires.

Second: Every front-runner from the Triple Crown winner Justify to the lowliest allowance runner confronts the conundrum presented by that outpouring of energy, namely, to pour as much energy as you can to stay where you want to be with, simultaneously, saving enough for a daunting stretch challenge in the last two furlongs, if you’ve not pulled far enough away by then to render that impossible. In the Florida Derby, Fierceness accomplished exactly that, but with a far smaller and far less talented field.

Finally, there’s this ominous detail to the many challenges the Kentucky Derby presents Fierceness: The Derby’s closer expert, Sierra Leone, didn’t come to the Derby through the Florida Derby. If Sierra Leone holds to his form in the ferocious maw of the going on Saturday, Fierceness will never have seen anything like a stretch challenge from a horse of Sierra Leone’s quality. If that comes to be in the last hundred yards of the 150th Kentucky Derby, Fierceness will have to find something extra in himself.

FRANKFORT — Former Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes was cleared Monday by Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd of charges by the state Executive Branch Ethics Commission that she improperly ordered the downloading and distribution of voter registration data from her public office while she was Kentucky’s secretary of state.

“The court order is a complete vindication of Secretary Grimes,” said her attorney, Guthrie True of Frankfort.

Attorney Jon Salomon of Louisville, who also represented Grimes, said the order shows “there was no substantial violation of any ethics law and the counts against her were arbitrary. “She was just doing her job.”

Grimes, reached Monday night, said, “After years of unrest, the Franklin Circuit Court has finally put to rest baseless allegations of ethics violations.”

She called the judge’s order “a victory for my staff, my administration and our work.”

The commission said it is reviewing the order and would decide whether to appeal. It had said in November 2021 that Grimes must pay $10,000 in fines for two ethical violations pertaining to handling of voter data.

The commission had been investigating Grimes for several years. Grimes, a Democrat and Lexington attorney, was secretary of state from 2011 to 2019 and an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2014 against Republican Mitch McConnell. She is the daughter of former state Democratic Party Chair Jerry Lundergan.

As secretary of state, Grimes was the state’s chief elections officer. In her position, she had access to data from the state Voter Registration System in the State Board of Elections.

Shepherd, in his 33-page order released late Monday afternoon, agreed with Grimes’ arguments that the commission’s charges were barred by the five-year statute of limitations and that the record did not support a finding of any violations of the state executive branch’s code of ethics.

The commission had charged that Grimes violated the ethics code by sharing voter information without requiring an Open Records request or other “established process of government.”

Grimes submitted that all the voter data at issue was information in the public domain, that she had full legal authority and discretion as secretary of state to access and share such information. She claimed no statute or regulation was violated by the sharing of such public information. 

Shepherd faulted the Ethics Commission for not conducting an evidentiary hearing in the case to hear testimony from witnesses.

Because the commission acted against Grimes without a hearing, “the evidence in the record relied upon by Grimes is not disputed,” the judge’s order said.

He also said the complaint against Grimes was filed outside the applicable statute of limitations. 

He noted that the attorney general’s office and the Ethics Commission had been investigating for more than eight years allegations of misconduct by Grimes.

“After exhaustive investigation by both the attorney general and the Ethics Commission, there was no allegation concerning any substantive violation of any statute or regulation regarding the integrity of the voting roll,” the court order said. 

“There was no allegation of tampering with the voting rolls, no allegation of improper registration or voting, no allegation of any irregularity in any vote count or tabulation, no allegation of altering any identification of any voter, no allegation of any action that could impact the outcome of any election during Secretary Grimes’ tenure as chief state election officer.”

The order added that the attorney general’s office never brought any criminal charges against Grimes and that the matter was referred to the Ethics Commission. 

The only allegations pursued by the Ethics Commission were that Grimes allegedly acted unethically in accessing public information in the voter registration system by downloading voter information on to a thumb drive when she was a candidate for re-election.

The commission also looked at whether Grimes improperly shared information on new voter registrations for certain House districts in response to a request made informally through the office of the state House speaker without requiring a formal Open Records request or charging a fee. 

The judge noted that the commission’s final order did not dispute that Grimes would have lawful access to the voter data but that the crux of its complaint against Grimes was that she “downloaded the lists for a private purpose, without paying the mandatory fees or submitting sworn forms required by law.”

The court order said the commission failed to expressly allege what “private purpose” was served by placing voter data on a flash drive.

“What that ‘private purpose’ could have been is entirely unclear to the court,” the order said. “It further remains unclear what ‘established process of government’ was violated by Grimes’ act of downloading VRS data onto a flash drive. 

“This lack of detail relating to what ‘established government process’ was violated and how using a flash drive constitutes a violation of” cast doubt that the commission was proving its allegation by clear and convincing evidence, the order said. 

Court Order in Grimes Case