Imho, I don't think you could ever predict this from speed figures. Maybe you could look at the sire stats and see that the sire stats from Arch on off tracks is very good, and coupled with what Battle of Midway did last year, yeah maybe you could call it a use at 85/1. It's a stretch, but fair play to you if you did. Bravazo's figure is heavily ground loaded. Decent off track stats on the sire. Well, this is clearly hindsight bias. I can see why one doesn't want to go down that road with you.
If I were to do a post mortem on this my aim would not have been to explain how these runners ran those numbers, those things happen, especially in conditions like these. It doesn't mean it's predictable. I would rather look at betting strategy, and maybe one concludes that the "all" button actually could prove a decent weapon in circumstances like these (the Derby exotics is something completely else than regular exotics, and the slop didn't exactly subtract from the chaos). I must admit that I have never used that button myself, in vertical wagers, well, to be honest, I don't even think I have ever played a superfecta. It's just not my style, but when you have a good key horse like TG players had in Good Magic, maybe it could be worth it. It's worth considering.
And when the favorites have won six times in a row, after the entrance of the new points system, well maybe it's worth to adjust ones "value parameters" when it comes to the favorites. As Ed DeRosa said multiple times after the Derby, Justify made those 5/2 look just fine. If he breaks badly, like Mendelssohn did, it's a different story. Baffert could've been wrong, those last hundreds of yards in the Santa Anita Derby could've been an optical illusion. But you didn't get 3/5, you got 2.9/1. A few weeks before one could get considerably better, at least here in Europe. It's a game of percentages, no doubt, but what a post mortem should do is helping you in calibrating your fair odds line. When lightly raced horses wins in an era where horses runs much less going into the derby, when the new points system disables sprinters to enter just to mess the whole dynamics of the race up etc, well maybe it is the right thing to do to downgrade things such as "foundation", "the apollo curse", "big jump ups" and "pletcher stats", maybe it isn't all that relevant anymore. At least not as relevant as before. Maybe. It's worth to take another look at.
Heck, maybe even there comes a year when the winner isn't auto-tossed around here 4 weeks in advance ;) (tongue in cheek).
