The Midwest Football League (MFL) was a professional american football minor league that existed from 1935 to 1940. Originally comprising teams from Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, the league eventually expanded its reach to include teams from Missouri, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and California to become a national league with major league aspirations by 1939. In 1938, the league became the American Professional Football League after the collapse of the second major league of the same name, but changed its name once again the following year to American Professional Football Association (APFA). Some sources refer to it as the American Professional Football League. Originally without major league aspirations, the APFA changed its ambition along with its name in 1939 when it admitted the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Bulldogs, two teams that survived the 1937 AFL collapse and spent the 1938 season as independent teams. Another independent Ohio team, the Columbus Bullies, also joined the loop for 1939. After the end of the 1939 season, the league was preparing to continue as a major league (with Milwaukee replacing Los Angeles in the lineup) when eastern businessmen lured Cincinnati, Columbus, and Milwaukee to join teams based in Boston, Buffalo, and New York to form a new American Football League. The resulting split doomed the APFA, as two members folded and two others were turned away from membership in the new league. Midwest Football League (1935–1937) The Midwest Football League was formed in 1935 with George J. Heitzler as president and James C. Hogan as secretary-treasurer. Like the National Football League in its first year, it was a loose assemblage of teams from the American Midwest, with teams representing Cincinnati, Dayton, Indianapolis, Louisville, Columbus, Ohio, and Springfield, Illinois. The league did not maintain standings for its first year and declared the Cincinnati Models, Indianapolis Indians and Louisville Tanks tri-champions. 1936 In its second year the MFL was transformed from an informal collection of teams to an official minor league of professional American football. A second team from Cincinnati, the Treslers (named after sponsor Tresler Oil), was added and the 1935 tri-champion Indians were replaced by another team from Indianapolis, the Leons. After a regular season in which the Cincinnati Models finished with an undefeated, untied record, the Louisville Tanks defeated them in the league championship game, 2-0 Two weeks later, the Models defeated the Tanks in a rematch, 19-7, but the MWL considered the