I think that’s right that it’s hard to both capture both distance of the player from the projected spot and the team projected to make the pick. But I do think you could come up with another wisdom-of-crowds sort of estimator that would aggregate all the opinions people had about who would make the picks. The simplest thing would be to take the team predicted most often to select each player (making some adjustment to try to account for too many players ending up with one team or something like that). Certainly doable. My guess is it would probably work less well than just trying to minimize the distance, but I may be wrong.

I think you’re right about the positional stuff for Dennard, but it’s also true that a quarter of the projections had the Jets taking a corner. The cluster separate from the rest appears more clearly for Dennard than it does for other corners like Fuller, Gilbert, and Verrett, who were picked closer to where people expected. But we are definitely talking small samples on this stuff.