Bulldogs

It took until November 1904 for the Canton Athletic Club to put the operation on a formal footing. The Bulldogs name settled in around 1906, though for a stretch after 1911 the team played simply as the Canton Professionals, and the club would later spend all of 1924 as the Cleveland Bulldogs before owner Ralph Hay brought it back to Canton the following year.

Jim Thorpe arrived in 1915, playing and coaching through 1920, and the Ohio League championships of 1916, 1917 and 1919 belonged largely to him. He was also the man the fledgling American Professional Football Association turned to as its first president in 1920, while still lining up for Canton. As player-coach, Guy Chamberlin took the Bulldogs through 25 games without a defeat and to back-to-back NFL championships in 1922 and 1923, results the league still credits as its own.

The Bulldogs folded after the 1926 season and were formally dissolved in 1927, leaving Canton with a charter membership in the NFL and no team to hold it. Massillon supplied the needle throughout — a rivalry that curdled into a betting scandal in 1906 and coloured professional football in Ohio for years afterward.

Maroon and white were the colours, and League Field in Canton was the ground, its capacity remembered at 8,000 from the crowds Thorpe drew in the 1910s.