A smooth manifold M with a decomposition T M = D 1 + . . . + D k of the tangent bundle into k > 2 subbundles appears in theories of nets and webs of foliations and in studies of Einstein equations on twisted products. We study a variational problem, which is the geometrical part of an Einstein-Hilbert type action on an almost product manifold, namely, we consider an integrated sum of mixed scalar curvatures of several distributions, as a functional of a pseudo-Riemannian metric, keeping the pairwise orthogonality of the distributions, and a linear connection. Unlike in the Einstein-Cartan theory, metrics in critical pairs metric-contorsion are restricted to those that make all distributions totally umbilical. We examine further some special cases: twisted products with statistical connections and 3-Sasaki manifolds with metric compatible connections. Considering variations of connection among statistical connections allows us to obtain examples of critical pairs metric-contorsion from critical adapted metrics of the action with zero contorsion tensor.