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Lions guard Laken Tomlinson will face a lot of competition heading into next season.

(Mike Mulholland | MLive.com)

PHOENIX -- Laken Tomlinson was a first-round pick just two seasons ago. Then the GM who drafted him was canned, and the new guy added three players in 15 months at his position.

Just like that, Tomlinson has lost his grip on a starting job and will face some healthy competition to even land a spot on the Detroit Lions' 53-man roster.

"Laken's going to compete at the left guard spot, and we'll head into training camp and OTAs with really good depth and really good competition across the board," GM Bob Quinn said this week at the NFL owners meetings in Phoenix. "So we'll see how it goes with Laken."

Tomlinson was an All-American right guard at Duke, and the Lions took him after trading back to 28th overall in the 2015 draft. He was immediately inserted into the lineup on the left side, too, and started all 16 games that year.

It was an up-and-down campaign, which is common for rookies everywhere and especially those up front. Nobody was sounding alarms, even when Quinn added interior linemen like Graham Glasgow and Joe Dahl to his first draft class.

But the problem is, Tomlinson showed little growth last year, and at times appeared to regress. Five games into the season, he was benched midway through a game against Philadelphia in favor of Glasgow. And seven games into the season, he was benched all together.

He didn't return to the lineup until Glasgow had to take over for the injured Travis Swanson at center.

Behind the scenes, Dahl was making serious strides in his move from tackle to guard, and h e actually replaced Tomlinson for a stretch of the season's penultimate game against Dallas. People throughout Allen Park -- including Quinn -- expect Dahl to be ready to push for an expanded role this year.

That creates a three-way battle at left guard, the lone uncertainty on a line that already seems sorted at left tackle (Taylor Decker), center (Swanson), right guard (T.J. Lang) and right tackle (Rick Wagner). So Glasgow, Dahl and Tomlinson will head into the offseason program vying for that last spot, and depending on how the roster shakes out, it's possible one of them won't have a job coming out of training camp.

This certainly isn't what Martin Mayhew envisioned when he spent a first-round pick on Tomlinson, the third interior linemen off the board in 2014. But it also shows how much Quinn has improved the talent and depth of the unit in his first 15 months on the job.