This doesn ' t really happen in baseball , but it is frequently known as tanking in basketball , and right now it looks like the Cleveland Browns my favorite team are currently tanking in football . It ' s a smart strategy theoretically , but fans start to become very impatient when they see their team intentionally being bad . It doesn ' t happen in baseball because their draft tends to be richer in talent than the NFL or NBA drafts are . So in baseball , even if you are picking late in the draft , you still have a great chance at picking someone who will grow into an excellent player . In the other 2 sports , the top 2 or 3 prospects are usually very obvious , and then there ' s a significant drop off from there . There ' s also only 2 rounds in the NBA draft , 7 in the NFL and a whopping 40 in the MLB .