Spartans

Portsmouth's professional side began as an independent club in 1928.

The team lasted three years in Ohio, and one afternoon there did more for its name than anything else. On 4 December 1932, the Spartans took the field against the Green Bay Packers with only seventeen men and played the whole game without a single fresh face off the bench — the display that got them called the Iron Men , a name that outlasted the club itself. That same season Portsmouth met the Chicago Bears in what is now reckoned the league's first championship game and lost 9–0.

A year later, in 1933, the Spartans won the Western Division, then folded up their Ohio operation for good and re-formed in Detroit as the Lions. Universal Stadium, later renamed for the team, held about 8,200 people, a capacity that said plainly how short a run a league franchise could expect in a town that size. For all the division title and the game that gave them their name, an NFL championship of their own never came while they still played as the Spartans.