About
Shawn Childs
Co-founder · the analyst behind the projections
Shawn Childs has more than 20 years of experience competing in and analyzing the high-stakes fantasy sports market across season-long, best ball, and daily fantasy formats. Over the past decade, his work has appeared at Sports Draft Daily, ScoutPro, Scout, Scout Fantasy, FullTime Fantasy, FFToolbox, Sports Illustrated Fantasy, and Fantasy On SI. He is also a member of the National Fantasy Baseball Championship Hall of Fame.
Shawn approaches the player pool with a neutral, risk-aware philosophy. His goal is not to manufacture bold takes for attention, but to identify difference-makers, understand where the market may be mispricing players, and build teams capable of surviving the uncertainty that defines fantasy sports. Injuries, changing roles, coaching decisions, and underperformance make fantasy inherently humbling, and Shawn's analysis reflects that reality rather than pretending every projection will be right.
His work focuses primarily on season-long fantasy football, season-long fantasy baseball, and DFS, with extensive experience across the NFBC, NFFC, FFPC, RTSports, Footballguys, FFWC, DraftKings, FanDuel, and Underdog Fantasy ecosystems.
The research calendar
Shawn's research calendar follows the fantasy season itself. Early in the year, he builds MLB team outlooks, player projections, positional strategy, breakout and sleeper analysis, and high-stakes draft preparation before competing in the NFBC. By spring, his focus begins shifting toward football, where he rebuilds all 32 NFL depth charts, evaluates incoming rookies, and produces full team outlooks.
By July, Shawn releases his first NFL projections, positional cheat sheets, fantasy-points research, and breakout, fade, sleeper, and deep-sleeper analysis. Throughout August, he updates projections weekly, tracks training-camp movement, analyzes ADP across major fantasy platforms, and reviews high-stakes drafts.
Once the NFL season begins, Shawn releases updated projections every week — typically late Tuesday night or Wednesday morning — with another update later in the week as injuries, roles, matchups, and news develop.
At SportsHack.ai, Shawn's experience, projections, and historical research serve as a foundation for turning decades of high-stakes fantasy knowledge into data-driven tools, rankings, and analysis designed to help fantasy players make better decisions.
His writing publishes here in full and unedited, under his own byline — his rankings, the case for each player, the question marks and the conclusions, as he wrote them. He also writes his own newsletter, which is his and stays his; we link to it rather than reprint it.
Where to read him
- · His analysis on SportsHack — published in full, in his own words
- · His newsletter — latest posts, with a link out to the full piece
- · The 2026 team guide — all 32 teams, his write-ups
This page makes no claim about how his picks perform. That question is answered on the live record, where every call is graded and the misses stay in, and on the backtest, which is retrospective and labelled as such. Both carry their own sample size and method.
SportsHack is built by Shawn Childs and J. Grant.