Tigers

Jim Thorpe spent only a short stretch in Cleveland. The team had started out in 1916 as the Cleveland Indians, and by the time it lined up in the American Professional Football Association in 1920 it did so under a different name, the Tigers, with player-coach Stan Cofall running the side.

It never won a championship and folded not long after.

The Tigers took the field in red and white.

Cleveland was not the only NFL franchise to wear the name. A Detroit club used it the same years at Navin Field, and a Brooklyn side carried it through a single winless wartime season in 1944 before merging into the Boston Yanks. None survived, and no team in the league goes by Tigers now — the name lives on in college football and, north of the border, in the CFL's Hamilton Tiger-Cats.