Tigers

Paul Brown built this franchise before Cleveland had a name for it, and the city gave him one anyway: Arthur B. McBride hired him in 1944, and the results matched the method. Cleveland won all four of its championships in the All-America Football Conference from 1946 to 1949, then joined the NFL in 1950 and won the title in its very first season there, adding three more in 1954, 1955 and 1964.

The colours never changed under either man: brown and orange, with white at the edges, still worn at Huntington Bank Field, capacity 67,431.

It survived the franchise's own disappearance, too — when the team left for Baltimore in 1996 and became the Ravens, Cleveland kept the name, the colours and the records, and waited for 1999, when the Browns took the field again as if the intervening seasons belonged to someone else.