Tigers

Peggy Parratt put the team together in 1916, running it himself as owner, player and coach, under the name Cleveland Indians. It took a change of hands to make it the Tigers: in 1920 the local promoter Jimmy O'Donnell bought the club and renamed it after his semi-professional baseball team of the same name, lining the football side up with his other business.

That same year the Tigers became a charter member of the American Professional Football Association, the league that would grow into the NFL. Stan Cofall, who organised and played for the side, was elected the new league's vice-president. On the field the results stayed modest: a 2–4–2 record and a tenth-place finish among the founding clubs, with the players turned out in red jerseys ringed with black at the sleeves.

The Tigers name lasted one season. In 1921 the club reverted to Cleveland Indians, a switch tied to the signing of three Native American players from the Canton Bulldogs and to the fact that Cleveland's baseball team already carried that name. Jim Thorpe, the APFA's first president, took over as player-coach for that final year, but a losing campaign and finances that would not hold gave the franchise no way forward, and it folded after the 1921 season.

No championship ever came its way in either of its two names.