Huskies

In 1933, a semi-professional side calling itself the Providence Huskies took the field in Rhode Island, borrowing a name that had already sat on an NFL sideline for years without carrying the words themselves — the Providence Steam Roller, an original NFL franchise through the late 1920s, ran out behind a husky as its mascot. The dog stayed; the name attached to it in 1933 never returned to the league.

No team called the Huskies has played in the National Football League, in any era. The nickname belongs to other codes and other levels of the game entirely: the University of Washington, the University of Connecticut and Northern Illonois University all field college teams under it, and for two seasons in the late 1940s the Toronto Huskies wore it in professional basketball's Basketball Association of America, the league that became the NBA. North of the border, Saskatchewan and Saint Mary's carry the name in Canadian university football, a different sport from the American one despite the shared vocabulary of downs and yards.

What connects these threads is coincidence of naming rather than shared lineage — a Rhode Island mascot, a handful of campus programs, one short-lived basketball club — and none of them meet on an NFL field, then or since. The husky, as a sporting name, has stayed a college and a court mascot; it never became a professional football one.