So no one wants to hear it but the chances of this trade being a bust for the browns are significantly higher than to work out (super bowl win). From a historical aspect it's not even close. Only 1 team has ever traded multiple first round picks for a player and won a Superbowl with that player and it was this year's Rams. Thats it. That's the list.
1. If your metric for success is "did they win a Super Bowl?," then damn near every strategy is going to look like a failure.
2. The "this has happened only one time, so the strategy isn't going to work!" argument falls flat. The key point here is that
proven, top-level quarterbacks with their prime years ahead of them never become available. It just doesn't happen. Watson is truly a unicorn in that regard. There is no precedent for a 26-year-old three-time Pro Bowl QB being available in a trade. None.
Let's look at the times teams have traded multiple picks for a player. We're not going to include the trades where teams traded multiple firsts to move up in the draft to select a rookie (e.g., Julio Jones, RG3, Ricky Williams; this also includes Jim Everett, for while he had been selected, he had never played a down in the NFL when the Rams traded multiple firsts to acquire him). We're looking only at players who had a body of NFL work when they were traded for multiple FRPs.
Here's the list: Eric Dickerson, Fredd Young, Herschel Walker, Jeff George, Keyshawn Johnson, Jay Cutler, Khalil Mack, Laremy Tunsil, Jalen Ramsey, Jamal Adams, Matthew Stafford, Russell Wilson.
We can/should eliminate the non-QBs. QB is far and away the most important position in football; the trades for non-QBs are just noise in this analysis.
That leaves us with George, Cutler, Stafford, and Wilson, along with Watson.
Wilson was just traded this offseason as well, so we have no idea yet how that one will work out. So we can exclude that one.
Stafford, as you said, won a ring in his first year for the Rams. I'm thinking LA is happy with the trade.
Cutler and George didn't work out as well. But neither one of them were in Watson's zip code as a QB. George had played four middling seasons for the Colts when they somehow convinced Atlanta to deal two FRPs for him. Cutler was probably the closest comp to Watson - he was coming off his third season with the Broncos (a Pro Bowl season, his first/only one) when Denver traded him to the Bears. Again, though, Cutler simply was not as good as Watson has been.
So you can try to point to past trades and yell "see?? it's probably not going to work out well!!!" But (a) there have been very few prior trades that are remotely comparable; (b) even those did not feature a player of Watson's caliber; and (c) in the most recent example of such a trade, the QB won his team a Super Bowl (using your own sky-high standard for success) in his first season.
It's a risk. We may be here in ten years saying "whoa, that one didn't work out well." But that doesn't make it a bad risk.