Tigers

League Park in Cleveland held about 21,000 people. The Tigers began there in 1916 as the Cleveland Indians, took the Tigers name in 1919, and a year later stood among the charter members of the American Professional Football Association, the body that became the NFL. Red and white were their colours, and Jim Thorpe turned out for the club, by then again calling itself the Indians, in its final season in 1921 before it folded.

No Tigers side ever won a title, in Cleveland or under either of the two other names the nickname carried through the league's early, unsettled years. The Columbus franchise wore it from 1923, built around the Nesser brothers who had anchored the club since its days as the Panhandles. The Brooklyn Tigers wore it only in 1944, when the Dodgers renamed themselves for a single winless season at Ebbets Field before merging into the Boston Yanks. Chicago's Tigers lasted one season too, in 1920, and were the first NFL club to disband.

League Park itself outlived the team that played there, and none of the Tigers franchises carried the name into the league as it stands today.