Electric Horsemen 158.76, Pork Shanks 135.16
For most franchises, Week 1 is simply the first game on the schedule. For the Electric Horsemen, it had quietly become something closer to an annual administrative failure.
That changed Sunday.
The Horsemen beat the Pork Shanks 158.76–135.16, snapping a three-year Week 1 losing streak and beating a Shanks team that had begun to gain the upper hand in one of the league’s more evenly matched head-to-head series. And unlike some Week 1 wins, this one wasn’t handed over by an opponent collapsing into a puddle of single-digit scores. Pork Shanks put up 135.16 points. Caleb Williams exploded for 41.26, Amon-Ra St. Brown added 23.7, and Bucky Irving scored 16.8. That is usually enough to win a fantasy football game.
It was not remotely enough.
A Week 1 Problem That Had Become a Trend
The Horsemen’s strange relationship with opening weekend stretches almost the entire history of the COL. From 2012 through 2017, Electric Horsemen were perfect in Week 1: 6–0. They opened every season by winning, as if the league schedule had been thoughtfully designed to provide them a complimentary appetizer. Then the calendar flipped. From 2018 through 2025, the Horsemen went 1–7 in Week 1:
2018 L
2019 L
2020 L
2021 L
2022 W
2023 L
2024 L
2025 L
Their lone victory during that eight-year stretch came against the Nosebleeds in 2022. The last three seasons had all started 0–1. So Sunday’s win does more than put Electric Horsemen atop the standings for a week. It moves their all-time Week 1 record to 8–7 and ends the longest current opening-day drought in franchise history. For a team with five COL championships, repeatedly stumbling out of bed in September was becoming one of the stranger blemishes on an otherwise ridiculous résumé.
The 158.76 points was the 6th most in an opener in league history and the most since 2021.
This Wasn’t a One-Man Win
The Horsemen-Shanks series has been remarkably balanced. Entering this season, Pork Shanks held a narrow 4–3 advantage in their seven meetings since 2019:
| Year | Winner | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Horsemen | 95.90–64.90 |
| 2020 | Shanks | 96.18–94.54 |
| 2021 | Horsemen | 94.62–70.10 |
| 2022 | Shanks | 122.38–113.82 |
| 2023 | Horsemen | 122.36–106.72 |
| 2024 | Shanks | 153.98–146.34 |
| 2025 | Shanks | 121.82–114.14 |
For six straight seasons, the matchup had alternated winners. Then Pork Shanks finally broke the pattern by winning in both 2024 and 2025, becoming the first team in the series to win consecutive meetings.
Sunday erased that momentum. With the victory, the series is now 4–4. Eight meetings. Dead even. Human beings apparently required nearly a decade of fantasy football to accomplish what a coin could have done immediately.
This Wasn’t a One-Man Win
The most encouraging part for Electric Horsemen was how the points arrived.
Derrick Henry: 34.8
Christian Watson: 29.7
Trey McBride: 20.0
Nico Collins: 17.7
Justin Herbert: 15.26
Rhamondre Stevenson: 12.0
Eddy Piñeiro: 11.0
That is an extremely healthy scoring distribution. Henry supplied the hammer, Watson delivered the week’s biggest surprise, and McBride and Collins did exactly what a roster built around elite pass-catching infrastructure needs them to do. Even more importantly, the Horsemen scored 158.76 despite getting only 4.5 from Drake London and 8.8 from Emeka Egbuka.
That matters.
A 159-point performance where virtually everyone hits his ceiling can be dismissed as a weekly eruption. A 159-point performance with two starting receivers combining for 13.3 suggests there may still be more available. Meanwhile, Pork Shanks had the opposite problem. Williams’ 41-point nuclear event disguised several holes. Marvin Harrison Jr., MarShawn Lloyd and A.J. Brown combined for only 11.6 points. Once those players failed to contribute, the Shanks needed nearly everything else to go perfectly. It didn’t.
A Different Kind of 1–0
One game doesn’t tell us much about a fantasy season. Fantasy football specializes in turning deeply confident Week 1 conclusions into embarrassing screenshots by Halloween.
But history gives this one a little more weight.
Electric Horsemen had not won an opener since 2022. They had lost seven of their previous eight Week 1 games. Pork Shanks had beaten them in consecutive seasons and held the first multi-game winning streak in the series. The Horsemen responded by hanging 158.76 on them and evening the rivalry at 4–4.
For once, Electric Horsemen don’t begin a season needing to explain why everything is still fine despite being 0–1. They are 1–0. And after eight years of mostly terrible opening weekends, that tiny number looks considerably larger than it should.
They now look ahead to a week 2 matchup with the Heavy Pistols, reeling from an embarrassing loss to last year’s last place team, The Blackouts.
