GREEN BAY — At first, it seemed as if Adam Stenavich might’ve misspoken. Then, the Green Bay Packers offensive coordinator made it clear that he had not. 

Stenavich was discussing the team’s offensive line last week, and emphasizing the importance of competition as he, head coach Matt LaFleur and offensive line coach Luke Butkus search for the ever elusive “best five” linemen.  

“We’re going to have,” Stenavich said during a 16-minute Q&A session with reporters during a break in Phase II of the offseason program, “a lot of competition there at both tackle positions with trying to find who our best five guys are.”

Whoa, wait a minute. Both tackle positions?

LaFleur and general manager Brian Gutekunst had already said earlier in the offseason that incumbent starting left tackle Rasheed Walker and 2024 first-round draft pick Jordan Morgan would be duking it out in training camp for that job, despite Walker’s 37 starts (including playoffs) the last two years. 

But right tackle Zach Tom’s starting spot is also up for grabs now, too?

Yep. In fact, Stenavich said as much one sentence later.

“However it shakes out — left tackle, right tackle, obviously right guard — there’s a lot of good competition,” continued Stenavich, who is entering his fourth year as the offensive coordinator after three seasons as the line coach. “The guys we’ve added, plus the guys getting older and getting more experience, it’s going to be really interesting to see how this all shakes out.”

Now, if you’d like to dismiss Stenavich’s choice of words as merely rhetoric about how everyone has to compete for their spots, notice the two positions he didn’t mention: Left guard, where the starter will be Aaron Banks after he signed a four-year, $77 million free agent deal to leave the San Francisco 49ers; and center, where two-time Pro Bowl left guard Elgton Jenkins is moving — although he’d like to have his contract adjusted to include some guaranteed money and the security that comes with it.

Thus, there’s no reading between the lines. Not only is Walker fighting to keep his job against Morgan, but starting right guard Sean Rhyan will also have competition for his spot (with a challenger yet to be determined), and so will Tom, who might have to fend off rookie second-round pick Anthony Belton to retain his starting gig.

All three of those incumbents, it’s worth noting, are 2022 draft picks — Rhyan a third-rounder, Tom a fourth-rounder and Walker a seventh-rounder — who are in the final year of their rookie contracts and are set to hit the open free-agent market next March.

And while Rhyan and Walker facing competition isn’t surprising, Tom seemed well on his way to getting a lucrative contract extension.

Instead, he’s in the same competitive boat.

“In this room, it’s always about competition. You know that. That stems from our head coach, from our offensive coordinator,” Butkus said. “The harder that they work, the better the room is going to be. And the more depth we’re going to have come fall. 

“They’re going [have to] come to work every day because you never know. This is the NFL, right? It happens. Every single day.”

Asked what he thinks Tom must do to solidify himself, Butkus replied, “Zach will be the first one to tell you, I think, [that] he wasn’t happy with his season last year. But that’s just who he is.  We’re never comfortable, we’re always hungry, we always want to get better.”

On that point, he’ll get no argument from Tom, who suffered a torn left pectoral muscle while bench-pressing during last year’s offseason program and underwent surgery to repair it at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. Tom wasn’t able participate in the team’s offseason organized team activity practices in the spring, and he was limited to individual drill work for the first week and a half of training camp last summer.

Nevertheless, he started all 18 of the Packers’ games last season (including playoffs) and played 1,070 of the Packers’ offensive snaps in the regular season (98.7%). Pro Football Focus had him as their sixth-highest graded offensive tackle league-wide, as the third-year starter finished with an overall grade of 85.8, a run-blocking grade of 87.8 and a pass-blocking grade of 81.0 — all personal bests. He also finished third among right tackles in the Associated Press’ annual All-Pro balloting, behind Detroit’s Penei Sewell and Philadelphia’s Lane Johnson.

Veteran players have not yet been made available to reporters this offseason, with OTA practices set to begin May 27.

But the 6-foot-4, 304-pound Tom acknowledged immediately after the season ended with a 22-10 NFC wild card playoff loss to the eventual Super Bowl LIX-champion Eagles that he didn’t play as well as he would have liked — or as well as he might’ve had he never torn his pec.

“I think it was a mixed bag. A lot of good, some bad,” Tom replied when asked to assess his own season. “I think I played better this year than I did last year, but I still think there were moments where I could have been better. And that just comes with the NFL. If you make a mistake, you learn from it and get better.

“Now, it’s just, I’ve got to get my body right, got to get back to a normal offseason. Obviously last year I had torn my pec and, I wouldn’t say it affected me — well, yeah, it did. It’s just one of those things that it threw a wrench into things. It gave me some adversity. It didn’t allow me to work on technique as much as I wanted to in the offseason.

“Obviously now it’s about getting my body back right, getting my pec back to 100%, and getting ready for next year.”

According to Tom, the injury forced him to block pass rushers differently than he would have at full strength, admitting that he never regained the power that he lost in his left side as he was unable to lift weights or train normally following the surgery.

“I don’t feel like I played with enough confidence with my outside hand, and I think that showed in some of my technique and got me beat quite often,” Tom said. “That was the main thing. But that’s just what comes with the NFL. Like, your knees are going to hurt, your back, those are things [happen to everyone]. I didn’t really trust my outside hand as much because of that, so now this offseason I’ve got to get back to getting that thing back to full strength and hopefully — not hopefully, when we come back, I’ll be back to what I can be.”

The smart money says that if he’s fully healthy, the 26-year-old Tom will return to form and earn himself a contract extension. But the challenge Tom is facing underscores the Packers’ competition-over-everything approach with their young team, which extends to the wide receiver group and other areas of the roster, too.

“Every day, you’ve got to earn your spot. And that’s what I like about the competition that we have in our offense right now,” Stenavich said. “Everyone’s going to have to show up and play well in order to keep their spot, because there’s a bunch of good, young players that are hungry.”

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