Throughout Packers training camp, we’ll bring you the five things each day that caught our attention — whether it’s a play at practice, something someone said in the locker room, a nugget of news or something offbeat that took us by surprise. 

Welcome to The High Five.

GREEN BAY — Matt LaFleur had his self-deprecating joke at the ready. And the Green Bay Packers head coach got to deliver it in his first answer of his daily pre-practice Q&A session with reporters.

With the NFL having decided on Monday that it would allow its head coaches to designate another staff member to throw the red flag to challenge officials’ calls — previously, only the head coach could do that — LaFleur was asked if he was open to giving that responsibility to someone else.

“I probably should give it up — based on past actions,” joked LaFleur, who according to Pro Football Reference has thrown a challenge flag 53 times in his seven years as the Packers’ head coach — winning 24 of those. “[But] I’ll probably hold the challenge flag.”

LaFleur said if he did give up the job, he’d give it to coaching operations coordinator Joe McKillip. Connor Lewis, the team’s offensive pass-game specialist and game management coach, works upstairs in the coaches’ box and usually advises LaFleur on whether to throw the flag.

LaFleur also acknowledged that an issue could arise when, as the offensive play-caller, he goes to the back of the bench area to huddle with quarterback Jordan Love or another offensive player and a questionable call is made while the Packers are on defense.

“Where it gets challenging is if you leave, to go talk to the quarterbacks or receivers or somebody on offense when the defense is out there and you have a bang-bang play, you’ve got [a problem],” LaFleur said. “But Connor’s usually in my ear, and then you just have to have urgency to get up there and throw the flag.”

Here’s our look at the five things that stood out on Tuesday:

1️⃣ While LaFleur left little doubt that Keisean Nixon is in a fight to keep his starting cornerback job, when the team practiced roughly an hour after LaFleur spoke with reporters, Nixon took all the reps with the starters on defense.

The previous two days, the defensive coaches had rotated Benjamin St-Juste in for one 11-on-11 series with the No. 1 defense in Nixon’s place. But on Tuesday, Nixon was there the entire practice.

“Just everything’s a competition right now, so we’re going to put different guys in different situations in different spots and see how they respond,” LaFleur said beforehand. Asked how Nixon has handled it, LaFleur replied, “I think he’s had two really solid performances.”

The Packers are intrigued by St-Juste, whom they signed in free agency, because of his size (6-foot-3) and length (78 5/8-inch wingspan) and his effectiveness in zone coverage.

“I think there’s a lot of things he’s done in terms of coverage and also fitting up in some of the run support things that we want to make sure we get from our corners,” LaFleur said. “So it’s going to be great to see him in live action.”

2️⃣ You’ve got to go pretty deep into your Spotify library to find Carl Douglas’ 1974 hit “Kung Fu Fighting.” But unlike that old-school tune, in which everybody was apparently fighting, at Packers camp, nobody is.

Veteran safety Xavier McKinney said Tuesday that he’s never gone this deep in a training camp without seeing a single fight, and this is his seventh year in the league. But he doesn’t think it’s because of a lack of intensity or physicality.

“I think we’re past that, to be honest,” McKinney explained after practice. “I think we have a bigger goal and that bigger goal is to get over this hump [of first-round playoff exits] that we’ve been dealing with these last couple years.

“We’re not focused on fighting. Nobody’s trying to get kicked out of practice. Nobody’s trying to have practice stop early. We’re just trying to focus on our technique. We’re trying to find ways where we can improve as individuals.

“We want to be the best group that we can possibly be. We want to be better than what we were last year. That’s the main focus. Fighting is not the main focus.”

McKinney acknowledged that there might be a fight or two during the Aug. 26 joint practice with the visiting Arizona Cardinals, but predicted the Packers-versus-Packers practices will continue to be fight-free.

“It could happen when we go to the joint practice,” McKinney said. “That always happens.”

3️⃣ Zach Tom —> Zach Bako-Bewele —> ZBak?

For the third straight day, right tackle Zach Bako-Bewele — formerly known as Zach Tom before a name change at the start of camp — took part in 11-on-11 periods after being limited to individual drills only at the start of camp.

Bako-Bewele, who suffered a season-ending partially-torn patellar tendon last December, said he doesn’t expect to play in Thursday’s preseason opener at Pittsburgh but he has progressed as he’d hoped in his comeback.

Bako-Bewele said his biggest concern when he started doing team periods was having the requisite confidence in his knee.

“Just being able to plant off that foot, being able to anchor on that foot. I think physically obviously there’s still some soreness but that’s to be expected, since I haven’t played football in nine months,” Bako-Bewele said. “Everything is still kind of a work in progress.

“I’m not really actively thinking about it. I’d say it’s more of a subconscious thing where you’re not really trusting it, you don’t really know it until you watch the film, but I wasn’t really out there thinking about it. I felt it, but it wasn’t like I was out there thinking, ‘Don’t use that knee, don’t use that knee.’ I was just trying to play football.”

Meanwhile, Bako-Bewele said his teammates have been adjusting to his name change and that he might have himself a new nickname. 

“I mean, really, it’s taken some getting used to for me, too,” Bako-Bewele said. “People still call me ‘Tom’ and I’ll still respond. I’m trying not to respond to it, training myself to go by the new name, but not bad. People have embraced it around the building, calling me by my new name.”

And how does he feel about the “ZBak” nickname, the brainchild of former teammate David Bakhtiari, who went by “DBak” during his Packers career?

“I actually like that. It’s nice and short, nice and simple,” he said. “Because we were trying to figure out, like, what I should go by. Do you call me Bako? They’re not just going to call me Bewele. I think ZBak, that rolls off the tongue. I like it. 

4️⃣ Veteran linebacker Zaire Franklin missed practice on Sunday, but for a good reason — he ran into a travel snafu on his way back from Canton, Ohio, where he attended the annual Pro Football Hall of Fame induction, which got him thinking.

Franklin made the trip to be there for his former Indianapolis Colts teammate, kicker Adam Vinatieri, whose induction speech went viral after he turned a portion of it into a roast of some of his highest profile former teammates.

“When you let kickers get a free mic, it’s no telling where that’s going to go,” Franklin said with a laugh.

Franklin was back for Monday and Tuesday’s practices and said he was glad he made the trip because Vinatieri had a “really profound impact” on him as a young player with the Colts.

“Canton was different. At first, I was really hesitant to go. Obviously, we’re on our journey here, we’re pushing for our achievements,” Franklin said. “We only played together a couple years, but he was a special teams captain in Indy before I was; they kind of passed [the captaincy] on to me after him, which was a big deal, at least for me. He taught me a lot about just how to carry myself in the meeting room, how to ask questions that the room was thinking about that nobody wants to say.”

5️⃣ The Packers are getting healthier, although they are having to churn the bottom of their roster to fill some injury-induced shortages at a few positions.

Unlike a few other teams around the league, including a couple in the NFC North, the Packers have thusfar been able to avoid any serious injuries. And they’re starting to get some of their front-line players back from the lesser injuries they’d dealt with.

Wide receivers Matthew Golden (toe) and Jayden Reed (ankle), cornerback Carrington Valentine (hamstring) and tight end Josh Whyle (neck) all returned to practice on Tuesday, and while LaFleur said running back Josh Jacobs (groin) won’t be back for at least the rest of the week, he wet through what looked like a fairly intense workout with one of the athletic trainers on Monday.

Rookie cornerback Domani Jones (offseason core muscle surgery) remains out, as do the players still on the physical unable to perform list — edge rusher Micah Parsons (knee), long snapper Matt Orzech (calf), tight end Tucker Kraft (neck) and defensive tackle Jordon Riley (Achilles’).

The team added a pair of safeites, Trey Dean and Tra Fluellen, to the roster and released offensive lineman Karsen Barnhart and tight end Drew Biber to make room for them.

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