The Kentucky Wildcats have been on a tear in the transfer portal, but they’re still searching for a true point guard.

Elijah Hawkins won’t be solving those issues.

On Tuesday, Hawkins committed to Texas Tech, according to Joe Tipton. Hawkins was planning to visit Kentucky sometime this week, but the Red Raiders nabbed his commitment before a trip to Lexington could happen.

The 5-foot-11, 165-pound guard was originally a class of 2021 signee of Howard, where he spent two seasons before landing at Minnesota in 2023. This past season, Hawkins averaged 9.5 points on 39.3% shooting (36.4% on 3-pointers), 7.5 assists, 3.6 rebounds, and 1.6 steals in 33.3 minutes per game.

Hawkins was easily one of the best passers in the portal, but he’s now off the board. It’s unclear if Utah point guard Deivon Smith is still a possibility after he was reportedly no longer likely to end up at Kentucky.

Kadary Richmond is still available, and Kentucky recently made contact. But for now, the Seton Hall transfer is expected to land at St. John’s.

Lamont Butler can run the point, but he primarily played off the ball at San Diego State.

Kentucky has some work to do to find a true point guard for next season.

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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.