Best of 2012: Your 30 Favorite Articles on DavidGonos.com

Thirteen years ago, I started a Fantasy Sports website called, FantasyRef.com, then I sold it a couple years later in order to join the Fantasy staff at CBSSports.com. After writing there for five years, I joined a start-up site called OpenSports.com, where I worked a few more years. When it fell in late 2010, I began writing with the guys at RotoExperts.com. I finally decided to just post my own blog this year, at DavidGonos.com, and start the whole cycle all over again! The following 30 posts are the most popular posts on my site this year, excluding player rankings.

Thank you, reader, for coming to my site over and over again. If you’ve shared these articles in the past, then I give you even bigger thanks! Maybe some of these articles are ones you haven’t seen yet. Enjoy!

Best of 2012: Most Popular Posts

1. Top 30 Fantasy Football Rookies for 2012

Yes, this one technically counts for rankings, but this article was a big hit socially, and both seasonal owners and keeper owners enjoyed it. While I hit on the first three, like most writers did, I totally whiffed on Andrew Luck (No. 10!?!) and Alfred Morris (No. 18!?!), as most other writers did also.

2. Top 18 Free Fantasy Football Draft Tools

There are a ton of great Fantasy Football sites out there, and I did my best to give the ones that came up with great tools their proper recognition. I’m just a writer – so I write. But these draft tools are great ideas implemented by quality web people. And we thank them!

3. 8 Best Fantasy Football Draft iPad Apps For 2012

Again, smart people with smart companies came up with some smart Fantasy Football Draft apps. I’ll try to do more articles like this, since apps change from year to year and new companies create new apps. Here’s an article I posted recently on the Top 27 iPad Apps for Guys.

4. Top Fantasy Football Twitter Accounts to Follow

When I originally posted this article, it started with like 60 writers – then people kept sending in recommendations and referring me to other Fantasy Football Twittererers, until finally, I stopped counting. Many of the guys on here have thanked me for adding them to the list because of how many new followers they got, but in reality, they do the sweet tweets that we should be thanking them for.

5. Fantasy Football Auction Strategy Dos and Don’ts

There aren’t as many leagues using Fantasy Football auctions anymore, and that’s a darn shame! There is so much added strategy to a Fantasy auction, compared to a straight Fantasy draft. I’ve been doing Fantasy auctions for about 11 years now, and I’ve picked up a few tips to share with you!

6. Yeti is Naming Your Baby!

My good friend @YetiVedder came through with his favorite Fantasy Football team names, and he thought you’d like them. Judging from the social shares – you did!

7. #TwitMock Fantasy Football Mock Draft 2012

In mid-August, I hosted an experts analysis Fantasy Football Mock draft through Twitter (hence the hashtag #TwitMock). We got some great writers in this mock draft, including Eric Mack of SI.com and Jim Day of FantasyTaz.com.

8. 8 Reasons Not to take Arian Foster First Overall

OK, I can admit I was wrong. Rice wasn’t horrible, and both were definitely better than LeSean McCoy, but Foster and Adrian Peterson were clearly the cream of the Fantasy crop this year.

9. #TwitMock Fantasy Football Redraft

After four weeks into the regular season, I held another #TwitMock analysis draft on Twitter (just four rounds this time), to see what the experts thought of the Fantasy Football arena from Week 5 on. Jamey Eisenberg and Nando Di Fino of CBSSports.com joined us for this mock draft.

10. 2014 Fantasy Football Mock Draft From the Future!

Mock drafts are fun during the offseason … so we like to do a lot of them! This time, we decided to project a couple seasons into the future, to see how the first two rounds of a Fantasy Football draft in 2014 would be. We had a couple hits (Doug Martin, Trent Richardson) and a couple misses (Jonathan Stewart, Marcus Lattimore). But either way, it was fun to do and fun to read.

11. Is RG3 the Best Fantasy Rookie QB Ever?

Over the last five weeks of the season, I detailed Griffin’s trek to overtake Cam Newton as the Best Fantasy Rookie QB Ever. If not for sitting out one week with a knee injury, he might have been able to do it.

12. 13 Excellent Fantasy Football League Ideas

I like to try to fix things that aren’t broken. It’s weird. So I gave my take on some different things that could make your league even better than it is now. Stuff like, add a college draft, do beer pong lottery, and adding a rivalry week to the schedule.

13. Fantasy Football Draft Picks: Where do you want to draft?

Would you rather have the first pick in your draft – or the third pick if you knew you could get one of the top three running backs? Would you rather have the seventh overall pick, or the 12th pick, since you could get the back-to-back picks into the second round? We tried to answer those questions to help you figure out where the best spot to draft was. (In my Softball Fantasy Football League with Emack and Eisenberg, I won the first “draft pick” choice, so I took 1.03, which meant I got LeSean McCoy. (I ended up being the highest scoring team in the regular season, too!)

14. Fantasy ADP Can Map Out Your First Four Picks

I took a look at ADP to see what your first four picks might end up being depending on what you selected in the first round. So if you took an RB in the first round, what would your team look like after four rounds? Or if you rolled the dice on a quarterback in the first, which players would be available in the next three rounds to round out your starters?

15. 2013 Fantasy Football Mock Draft Rd 1

This is my most recent article, and it immediately became a hit, as those that were knocked out of the playoffs early were already looking ahead toward 2012. I’ll continue to update Round 1 and Round 2 until just after the Super Bowl. We’ll also be holding another mock draft in a couple weeks, too.

16. Rocky RB Roads Ahead

A writer that goes by @FantasyAce on Twitter asked if I’d like a guest article on the site. I said yes – and he dropped this bad boy on me. It was basically a great look at five running backs that were going to have a rough first five weeks of the season.

17. 4 Great Reasons to Draft Chiefs RB Jamaal Charles

J.J. Zachariason, of LateRoundQB.com, made a persuasive argument to draft Jamaal Charles this summer, despite being just a year away from a torn ACL injury. He convinced me – I drafted Charles in four of my seven leagues.

18. Megachoice: Don’t Draft Calvin Johnson in the Top 6

Zachariason came right back with an awesome analysis piece on whether or not you should draft Calvin Johnson with the sixth overall pick. In retrospect, Megatron looks pretty awesome as the top wide receiver taken.

19. 10 Fantasy Football Tips For Winning Your League

Another great Fantasy Football article from a guest writer came from the guys at FantasyTrade411.com. Nick Raducanu gave his quick tips on how to win in your Fantasy Football league. He’s a proven winner, get on board!

20. Best Fantasy Football Draft Party Locations

A foodie friend that I’ve known since the early ‘90s wrote a nice guest blog for me, detailing his 12 favorite places for a Fantasy Football draft in the United States. Logan Crumpton is one of the owners of the EataDuck blog, one of my favorite foodie blogs.

21. Top 12 Fantasy Football Tools You Wish Existed

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve thought about our little hobby here for a couple decades now, and every now and then, I come up with some ideas of how websites and league services could make our lives easier. I got a ton of great responses on this article, with a couple product managers saying they’ll take some of these into consideration for 2013.

22. My Disney Poop Story

This is the story I’ll be known for in 50 years. I can live with that. It’s not quite as gross as the name sounds, but it’s not quite something you should read to your mother-in-law.

23. 12 Worst Fantasy Picks Ever

Can you imagine drafting a player No. 1 overall (a player that has been the best Fantasy player for the past two seasons), and he tears his ACL in his fourth game of the season? Or drafting a guy that broke a record for touchdown passes in a single season, only to have him blow out a knee in Game 1? Here are 12 horror stories from the past 20 years.

24. Fantasy Football Draft Prep: Player vs. Player

One of my favorite articles to write each season is this Player vs. Player article, where I ask several other Fantasy experts which players they would draft at this position: This guy or that guy. Then they offer up some reasoning and it becomes a really interesting piece. I also do this type of article for Fantasy Baseball leagues, so look forward to that.

25. 2012 Fantasy Football Mock Draft MFL 10s

This was a review of an experts league draft that took place in mid-June, one of the earliest of the offseason. The guys at MyFantasyLeague.com invited me into it, and I ended up scoring the most points in the regular season, and winning the whole league in the playoffs on the backs of my first two picks: RB Marshawn Lynch and QB Drew Brees.

26. 10 Overvalued Fantasy Football Players, and 31 Other Things

This was just a fun article to write, mixing in 10 players and a bunch of other things I considered overrated. Some of my hits include: Denarius Moore and Larry Fitzgerald. Some of my misses include: RG3 and Stevan Ridley.

27. What the Past Tells Us About Julio Jones’ Future

This was another great guest article, this time from @FantasyDouche, who also wrote one of my favorite football books this year — Game Plan: A Radical Approach to Decision Making in the National Football League. In this article, he breaks down the player comparisons to Julio Jones, to help us figure out what we should have expected.

28. My Top 5 Players, 1 Sleeper – Grantland Rejection App

One of my favorite websites over the past two years has been Grantland.com. They recently ran a contest to have people write their Fantasy Football articles in 2012, and I submitted my application (that’s what this article is). They rejected it, and I was bitter! But my friend @FantasyDouche made it, which made me happy for him. Then he told me about how much writing is involved – and I was even more happy … that I didn’t win.

29. Making a Case For Taking Ray Rice First Overall Over Arian Foster

OK, OK, I get it. I blew it. And not only did I blow it in one article (See No. 8), but I had to double-down on the wrong move with this second article. Well done, DG.

30. 2013 Fantasy Rookies Draft – Rd 1 For Dynasty Leagues

This was another one of our recent articles posted that shot up the rankings, as Paymon Shokoohi of DynastyLeagueFootball.com shares his top 12 rookies from the 2013 NFL Draft Class. He does a mock first round draft for Fantasy leagues in 2013, for our reading pleasure!

I hope you enjoyed this look back on 2012 – and you join me in looking forward to 2013!