Cleveland Tigers (NFL)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Cleveland Tigers were born from a roster raid. In 1915, the Massillon Tigers stripped the Akron Indians of their best players, leaving that team gutted and its player-coach, Peggy Parratt, with few options. Parratt's response was to rebuild somewhere new. He took a handful of former Akron men and some fresh college talent, moved to Cleveland, and started again. What emerged from that act of necessity was the first Cleveland franchise in what would become the National Football League. The questions this history raises are worth sitting with. How does a team born from wreckage earn a place at the founding table of professional football? What does it mean when two future Hall of Famers can't save a season? And why does a franchise with that pedigree simply vanish over a thousand-dollar guarantee?

• 2. Parratt's Rebuild

  ›

  Peggy Parratt had managed the Akron Indians through years of Ohio League competition before 1915 changed everything. The Massillon Tigers raided his roster and walked away with the star players. Rather than rebuild Akron, Parratt pivoted to Cleveland in 1916 and assembled a new team he called the Cleveland Indians. The roster combined veterans from Akron with ex-college players entering the professional game. The 1916 season produced a winning record, which might have felt like a success. But Cleveland twice fell to the Canton Bulldogs, a team led by Jim Thorpe, and split two games with the Columbus Panhandles. That pattern of near-success and pointed failure would follow the Cleveland franchise for years.

• 3. The Founding Meeting

  ›

  In September 1920, team owners gathered in Canton, Ohio to build something more organized than the loose Ohio League they had been operating in. Two men represented Cleveland at that meeting: Jimmy O'Donnell, a local sports promoter who had secured the franchise, and Stan Cofall. Cofall had played football at Notre Dame from 1914 to 1916 and later played for the Massillon Tigers. He had helped reorganize the Cleveland team starting in 1919. At the Canton meeting, the American Professional Football Association was formally established, and Cofall was elected its vice-president. O'Donnell brought a ready-made identity to the new franchise. He already owned a semi-pro baseball team called the Tigers, and that name transferred to the football club.

• 4. Stan Cofall's Season

  ›

  Cofall served as the Cleveland Tigers' player-coach for the first half of the 1920 season, running the team from the field while also holding a league office. The results were difficult. Cleveland scored only two touchdowns across the entire season and lost three games by the same 7-0 score each time. Their final record stood at 2-4-2, placing them tenth in the new association. Al Pierotti shared the coaching duties with Cofall at some point during the year. The team's inability to move the ball was the defining feature of that first campaign, and it left the franchise searching for something it lacked: a player capable of commanding the field.

• 5. Thorpe and Guyon Arrive

  ›

  For the 1921 season, the franchise solved two problems at once. The team's name shifted from Tigers to Indians, partly because Cleveland already had a baseball team by that name since 1915, and partly because three Native American players were signed away from the Canton Bulldogs. Among them were Joe Guyon and Jim Thorpe. Guyon was a tackle and halfback; Thorpe came in as player-coach and brought his reputation from Canton. Cleveland won its first two games of 1921. Then, in the second of those wins, Thorpe injured his ribs and was ruled out for the rest of the regular season. The team narrowly dropped the next four games without him. Thorpe's absence transformed a promising start into an 3-5-0 record, placing the Indians eleventh in the league.

• 6. The Postseason Return

  ›

  Jim Thorpe did come back, though not in a regular season game. In December, he returned to action for a postseason matchup against the New York Brickley Giants. Cleveland won. It was the kind of result that suggested what the team might have been with a healthy Thorpe for a full year. Joe Guyon, who would be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1966, and Thorpe, who entered in 1963, had given the franchise its most talented roster. But there was no season after that to build on. Early in 1922, O'Donnell asked the league for permission to suspend operations for a year. The league agreed. When O'Donnell could not post the required one-thousand-dollar annual guarantee, the NFL canceled his franchise outright. Guyon and Thorpe left together for LaRue, Ohio, where they formed the Oorang Indians.