Preakness 2016 Odds: Jockeys to Trust, Fastest Horses and More Picks

Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.

There won't be sunny skies at the Preakness on Saturday, according to The Weather Channel, with rain expected between 2 p.m. ET and 7 p.m and temperatures in the high 50s. It's going to be a muddy race, folks—one of the main factors as Nyquist seeks to win the second leg of the Triple Crown.

Before we break down the race's various other factors, let's take a look at the field and the odds:

Post	Horse	Trainer	Jockey	Odds
1	Cherry Wine	Dale Romans	Robby Albarado	25-1
2	Uncle Lino	Gary Sherlock	Fernando Perez	33-1
3	Nyquist	Doug O'Neill	Mario Gutierrez	4-7
4	Awesome Speed	Alan Goldberg	Jevian Toledo	33-1
5	Exaggerator	Keith Desormeaux	Kent Desormeaux	15-4
6	Lani	Mikio Matsunaga	Yutaka Take	40-1
7	Collected	Bob Baffert	Javier Castellano	16-1
8	Laoban	Eric Guillot	Ricardo Santana Jr.	40-1
9	Abiding Star	Ned Allard	J.D. Acosta	40-1
10	Fellowship	Mark Casse	Jose Lezcano	40-1
11	Stradivari	Todd Pletcher	John Velazquez	8-1

There are a few ways to dissect this race. If you like to put as much stock in the jockey as the horse itself, you have several strong picks.

While Victor Espinoza—who has won the Preakness three times overall and the last two runnings of the race—won't be among the field on Saturday, several other former winners will be saddling up. 

Mario Gutierrez, who won the Preakness on I'll Have Another in 2012, will be riding the favorite Nyquist (as though the horse needed any other advantages after winning his first eight races, including the Kentucky Derby). 

Kent Desormeaux, meanwhile, has won this race twice and will be on the primary challenger to Nyquist, Exaggerator. The weather conditions look to favor Exaggerator, as the horse has won twice on muddy tracks and the slower surface could level the playing field with the faster Nyquist.

Finally, Robby Albarado (Cherry Wine) and Javier Castellano (Collected) have also won at the Preakness. 

But what about the fastest horses?

Well, look no further than Nyquist, who ran a brilliant race at the Derby. Consider that Danzing Candy set a blistering early pace, finishing the first half-mile in 45.72 seconds, which was the ninth-fastest half-mile split in the history of the race, per Joe Posnanski of NBC Sports.

Matching that sort of pace would cause most horses to tire down the stretch. Not Nyquist. He finished with a time of 2:01.31, the fastest since 2003 and nearly two seconds faster than last year's Triple Crown winner, American Pharoah, according to Posnanski.

Not even Exaggerator's fantastic late push was enough to catch Nyquist.

"I thought I had him," Desormeaux told Posnanski. "But Nyquist is the champion that he is."

Exaggerator certainly has the strongest closing speed of the bunch, though at the shorter Preakness, Desormeaux will need to kick his horse into high gear earlier than he did at the Derby. Frankly, had Nyquist not run a historically good race, we'd probably be talking about Exaggerator's quest for the Triple Crown.

But hey, losing to Nyquist is nothing new for Exaggerator. That's happened four times already.

Saturday's likely muddy track will probably present the best opportunity for Exaggerator to break that streak, as the slop should mitigate some of Nyquist's superior speed and it could make the race even more tactical. 

NBC Sports shared an image of the track on Saturday morning:

That might cause some of the other fast horses in this field (Stradivari, Collected) to struggle, while a longshot like Cherry Wine—who has won in the slop before—could be the biggest beneficiary. 

Still, even in these conditions, Nyquist remains the heavy favorite. Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated noted that part of the reason for that is a lack of elite competition:

"

Handicappers have turned the Preakness upside down in search of alternatives to Nyquist and found little reason to believe he can be beaten. Bob Baffert, who trained American Pharoah and has won the Preakness six times, annually posits that if an honest horse wins the Kentucky Derby (not a fluke winner), that horse should win the Preakness. He will contest the Preakness this year with Collected, his B-team three-year-old who won the Lexington Stakes at Keeneland in Kentucky, three weeks before the Derby.

“Why am I here?” asked Baffert. “I figure if Nyquist happens to throw an interception, we want to be there to catch it. We’re looking for a turnover.”

"

So is the rest of the field. But Nyquist feels more like Tom Brady than Jay Cutler.

The weather will change this race. Stradivari or Collected would have been popular picks to finish third on a sunny day. In this weather, Cherry Wine will slip into the top three.

On a sunny day, it's hard to imagine Exaggerator upsetting Nyquist. In this weather, Exaggerator will make things very, very close.

But Nyquist won't lose. Nyquist has won in less-than-ideal conditions, too, and it's always difficult to bet against a horse that has yet to be defeated. It will be an excellent race. But Nyquist, once again, will be a most excellent champion.

You can follow Timothy Rapp on Twitter.