GREEN BAY, Wis. – After 12 years of these things, you pretty much know what Ted Thompson will say at his annual pre-draft news conference.

The Green Bay Packers general manager will opine on the best-player-available-philosophy, and that’s about it.

But wait a minute? Maybe it’s not as much of a way of life as it is a guideline that doesn’t come without some wiggle room. That Thompson admitted as much was almost as surprising as it would have been if he had revealed his entire draft board to the room full of reporters at Lambeau Field on Wednesday.

“I suppose there is,” Thompson said. “I suppose there is. I would never tell you there is. If you asked me, I would say, 'Well, that's not the way I wanted it.' But, yeah, I mean, it's not written in stone.”

Thompson wouldn’t go so far as to admit he picks players to fill specific needs, but it can serve as the tiebreaker when everything else is equal.

“Well, we try to draft the best player available,” he said slipping back into his usual comments. “I say this every year and everybody says, ‘Yeah, right.’ We think it’s important to stay focused and try to take the best player. I think from a personal standpoint, in terms of common sense it makes sense to me that you would want to take the best player because the situation about needs is normally a temporary one.

“What you think you might need is not necessarily what you’re really going to need next week because things are going to change between now and next week. So as long as you’re taking really good players and taking the best players you can identify as being the best players available, then you are, in some respects, able to stay a little bit in front of the curve, if you understand what I’m saying.”

That may be easier for Thompson to do when he’s picking near the end of the first round like he is this year and has done more often than not since he took over in 2005.

“You can be in a position where this solves Problem A on our roster, but he's also the best player available,” Thompson said. “You can be in a position and get lucky where you can address both, but if it comes to a point or the other, I would prefer to take the best player available.”

So what does Thompson’s draft board look like?

He knows he’ll need to have a cross-section of players given the unpredictability of what might happen in the 26 picks before he’s on the clock.

“When you’re picking 27th, it’s much more difficult to come up with the actual 27 names and be sure that these are the guys will have been taken and these are the ones that will be left for you,” Thompson said. “It gets to be a little more mathematically difficult to predict. But you have groups of players and you try to say, ‘OK, this guy and this guy are pretty close. They play different positions but they’re pretty close.’ Maybe we’ll put them as a couple that might be there and that sort of thing. It’s constant evaluating. We’ve been doing it leading up to this and we’ve still got another week to go. It’s constant.”