One-on-One: Why Browns, Cardinals are under white-hot spotlight

Tunison: Sadly, the Giants finally made it clear after a little miscommunication that they won't have an open competition between Eli Manning and Daniel Jones for Week 1 starter, as that would have injected a little more chaos into an already hectic situation there.

Otherwise, I have to think it's the early adjustments that Arizona makes, led by rookie head coach Kliff Kingsbury and rookie quarterback Kyler Murray. Obviously, Kingsbury isn't going to tip the hand of his entire offensive strategy before the regular season rolls around, but it's going to be important to gauge how comfortable every player on the team feels about the transition in the coming month or so.

The Cardinals also have former first-round draft pick Kevin White, he of the career in Chicago tragically hampered by injury. I wouldn't say whether he cracks the roster is alone a top storyline, but it adds an intriguing wrinkle to an already interesting situation in Arizona.  

Mueller: It feels incongruous to be mentioning the Cardinals and Browns in a discussion of the biggest stories heading into training camp, but here we are, and the shoe fits in both cases. Call it the No. 1 pick effect, or the Oklahoma quarterback effect, or the Heisman Trophy effect, but both teams absolutely deserve the buzz surrounding them.

Each coach has something to prove, as well. Freddie Kitchens has been dispensing homespun wisdom and folksy soundbites since getting the job in Cleveland, but he doesn't just have to manage egos, he also needs to prove that he can effectively balance two large tasks--- being the "CEO" of the team, but also calling plays for Mayfield. It makes sense that he would want to retain control of the calls, given that Mayfield's comfort level with him is likely the reason he's the head coach, but everything else that the team does still falls on him. Given the questions the Browns have on defense, he probably wishes that wasn't the case. 

Kingsbury's situation fascinates me simply because he never won big in college -- he was 35-40 at Texas Tech -- and got the Cardinals job primarily because of his reputation as an offensive guru. The disastrous Josh Rosen trade came about because Arizona went all-in on Kingsbury and his system, which meant selecting Kyler Murray, whose college stats last season were scintillating (260-for-377, 4,361 passing yards). Murray isn't Mayfield, but the latter's success paved the way for him to be taken first overall. The idea of using the first pick in the draft on a quarterback under six feet tall, even one as physically gifted as the 5-10 Murray, would have been anathema even a few years ago. Now, he and Kingsbury will be tasked with executing a turnaround similar to what Mayfield managed with the Browns last year. They don't have to make the playoffs, but they have to turn the Cardinals -- who were 3-13 last season -- into something other than a punchline.

All of this is juicy enough on its own, but the fact that ownership for both franchises isn't highly regarded in the way of, say, the Rooneys in Pittsburgh or the Maras in New York, and you have yet another layer of intrigue for both teams. 

Tunison: The upside of training camp drama and preseason positional battles is it all usually melts away by about halftime of Week 1. Kitchens has half a season of rapport building under his belt with Mayfield and the rest of the Cleveland offense, so little they do between now and September is likely to resonate. The only real X-factor in Cleveland is assuaging Beckham. He's likely eager to make a good impression and knows his tempestuous reputation precedes him, so presumably he'll be less likely to fly off the handle early this season, though no one ever does quite know, and it'll still be important for Kitchens to convince OBJ the head coach has his back.

Kingsbury, especially as a 39-year-old coach with little demonstrated success in terms of wins and losses, might have to do a little more to win the locker room in the next five weeks. It helps that team elder Larry Fitzgerald, only four years Kingsbury's junior, has already given positive hints as to what the conditioning will be like, if offseason workouts are any indication. "It's not so much what he's installing that stands out; it's how its run, the tempo of it," he told TheMMQB. "Every single day, with more experience, we were able to run it faster and faster and faster, get more plays in more efficiently. The faster guys understand the concepts the more pressure we can put on defenses."

Tempo was a belabored mantra with Chip Kelly, the last ballyhooed college offensive mind to hit the NFL, so take this all with a grain of salt for now. That said, Chip's innovations did catch the league a little off-guard early in his stint with the Eagles, so maybe that's something to be hopeful for with Kliff in 2019 if he's even a fraction of the real deal.