Tigers

The University of Detroit had a football team by the turn of the century, and in 1905 a group of its players, led by Bill Marshall, put together the Detroit Heralds to keep playing outside campus. The Heralds turned semi-professional in 1911 and stayed together long enough to become a charter member of the American Professional Football Association in 1920, the league that would later call itself the NFL.

The name Tigers lasted one season. Ahead of 1921 the club dropped the Heralds name and borrowed the city's baseball brand, trading on the popularity Detroit's Major League Baseball team already carried. Marshall stayed on as coach. The football Tigers played their games at Navin Field, the baseball park that would later be rebuilt and renamed Tiger Stadium, in front of a ground that held 23,000.

On the field there was little to borrow the name for. The Tigers finished 1–5–1 and sat last among the sixteen teams in the APFA standings. By mid-November the money had run out, players were going unpaid, and the club folded before the season was properly finished; what remained of the roster was handed to the Buffalo All-Americans to complete their games.

No championship ever came, and the club is now more often mistaken for the Detroit Lions, the team that later carried Detroit's name to NFL titles, or for the baseball Tigers it borrowed its identity from for that single, unfinished year.