A lot of people have pointed this out, but I still don't think it means it would have worked out the same way.
Bad teams can afford to gamble. They can let prospects and fringe guys play lots more and try to salvage something out of them. Teams contending for Super Bowls cannot unless out of desperation.
Brown caught 1 pass last year. 1. That wouldn't have helped us at all. And that's assuming he got on the field.
For a terrible Browns team, he can play lots. He got to play 16 snaps (over 20% of the offensive snaps) in a win against the 49ers. The next week, he gets to play 15 more in a brutal loss to the Seahawks. In his last game of the season, he plays almost the entire game (72% of the snaps) and catches 1 pass for 42 yards on 6 targets.
For the season, he has 3 games, 1 catch, 42 yards, 8 targets, 1 rush for -1 yard.
But Cleveland doesn't care. They're playing for the future. We're fighting for the #1 seed and a potential Super Bowl run. You can't give 91 snaps to some inexperienced player making a position switch in the middle of all of that.
Those snaps were a crucial part of his development, but he wouldn't have gotten them here. In a parallel universe, we do sign him, he doesn't know the offense, doesn't even know how to play the position, gets cut, and never develops.
He's a wonderful talent and I'm happy to see him doing well. But there's a really good chance he never would have succeeded here even if he had signed based on the totally different states of the two franchises.