Bulldogs

Two NFL titles in three seasons, 1922 and 1923, came on the back of a 25-game unbeaten run that stretched from 1921 through both championship years. Before the league existed in that form, Canton had already taken three Ohio League crowns, in 1916, 1917 and 1919, and gone unbeaten in four separate seasons.

The team started out in 1904 as the Canton Athletic Club, fielding baseball and football sides under one roof, and only picked up the Bulldogs name during the 1906 season, discarding earlier labels like "The Red and White" and "Wallace's Men." That same year, a betting scandal around coach Blondy Wallace, accused of throwing a game, drew a libel suit that shut professional football out of Ohio for years afterward. The rivalry at the center of that era was with the Massillon Tigers.

When the American Professional Football Association formed in 1920, Canton was among its founding members, and its first permanent president was Jim Thorpe, the Olympic champion who had been serving as the Bulldogs' player-coach since 1915. He stayed on through the 1920 season, by which point the club he'd led was about to enter its most decorated stretch.

The run did not last. Financial trouble forced owner Ralph Hay to sell the team in 1924 to Sam Deutsch, who shifted the franchise to Cleveland and renamed it the Cleveland Bulldogs, leaving Canton without a team for that season. A revived version played from 1925 to 1927 before folding for good. What Canton never got afterward was a return to the league itself; the city's football memory now rests with the Pro Football Hall of Fame rather than with a club still on the field.