I Was Wrong About the Points System
For the better part of a decade, I've been one of the voices arguing that the Kentucky Derby points system — which replaced the old graded-stakes-earnings qualification method in 2013 — made the race more formful. The logic felt airtight: the old system let sprinters earn their way into the Derby through graded stakes money alone, those horses set suicidal paces they couldn't sustain, and the chaos that followed produced longshot winners. Remove the sprinters, get honest paces, and the best horse wins more often.
It's a clean narrative. And it's wrong — or at least, there's nothing in the data to properly support it.
This week, DRF's David Aragona and Dave Grening published an excellent analysis on their Derby Watch series showing that Kentucky Derby paces in the points era have not been any slower than in the years before it. In fact, they've been slightly faster on average. This is a point our friend Chris Larmey has also made on this network. The idea that the points system produced slower, more manageable paces simply doesn't hold up against the data.
That got me thinking: even if the paces haven't slowed, has the Derby become more formful? The surface-level numbers say yes. Since 2013, the betting favorite has won 50% of the time, compared to 33% in the 12 years before the points system. Longshot winners (20-1 or higher) have been cut nearly in half — from 33% to 17%. On its face, the Derby looks like a different, more predictable race.
So I went looking for the explanation. My first instinct was the sprinter theory: surely the points system filtered out the one-dimensional speed horses who used to set unsustainable fractions and blow up the race. I pulled data on every pace leader from the pre-points era — Songandaprayer (2001), Spanish Chestnut (2005), Keyed Entry (2006), Recapturetheglory (2008), Join in the Dance (2009) — and checked their resumes.
Every single one of them was a legitimate route horse. Songandaprayer had won the Fountain of Youth at a mile and a sixteenth and finished second in the Blue Grass. Spanish Chestnut won the San Rafael at a mile. Keyed Entry ran third in the Wood Memorial. These weren't sprinters who wandered into the Derby — they were two-turn horses who simply went too fast on the day.
With the sprinter theory debunked, I ran the numbers through a basic statistical significance test. And here's where the story ends with a thud rather than a bang: the difference between 4 favorite winners in 12 races and 6 favorite winners in 12 races is not statistically significant. The probability of seeing 6 or more favorite winners in 12 races, even if the true rate is only 33%, is about 18%. That's well within the range of normal randomness.
The entire "formfulness" finding comes down to two extra races in a 12-race sample. Two. That's it.
Now, it's possible there is a real effect and the sample is just too small to prove it. We'd need roughly 100 Derbys under each system to draw a reliable conclusion, and we're not going to get that. It's also possible that the points era coincided with a run of genuinely superior horses — American Pharoah, Justify, Nyquist, California Chrome — who would have won under any system. We can't separate the system from the horses who ran in it.
But the honest conclusion, the one I should have reached years ago, is this: I don't have the evidence to say the points system made the Kentucky Derby more formful. The paces haven't changed. The sprinter theory doesn't hold. And the favorite win rate is within the range of what randomness can explain.
Sometimes the most interesting finding is that there's no finding at all.
Post positions are drawn today. The real handicapping starts now.
