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The Memphis Mad Dogs were a Canadian football team that played the 1995 season in the Canadian Football League. The Mad Dogs were part of a failed attempt to expand the CFL into the United States. They played at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium.
The team's ownership group included Fred Smith, founder of FedEx.
Franchise history
Prior to the Mad Dogs, Fred Smith was part of an ownership group (along with such entities as former Memphis Showboats owner William Dunavant and the estate of Elvis Presley) that tried to get a National Football League team into Memphis in 1993. The Memphis Hound Dogs, as the proposed team was to be called, was one of five teams to be considered, but was passed over in favor of the Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars. Smith, after briefly considering a proposed "new league" backed by CBS, then turned to the CFL. The league was very impressed with Smith; his group was the richest in CFL history at the time. It seriously considered selling either the Hamilton Tiger-Cats or Calgary Stampeders to Smith. After those teams resolved their ownership situations, Smith's group was granted an expansion franchise for 1995. With Presley's estate no longer involved, the team's name was changed from the "Hound Dogs" to the "Mad Dogs," ostensibly through a name-the-team contest.
On the field
The Mad Dogs hired Pepper Rodgers as their head coach, who was familiar to Memphis pro football fans as he was the head coach of one of the city's previous pro football teams, the Memphis Showboats of the USFL; the Mad Dogs had also hired Steve Erhart, the Showboats' general manager, in the same capacity, and even hired one of the Showboats' backup quarterbacks (Mike Kelley, who had been mostly out of work since the USFL's failure). In many ways, building the Mad Dogs as a continuation of the Showboats was an attempt to emulate the Sacramento Gold Miners, who had built on the previously successful Sacramento Surge. Rodgers, a Memphis native, also had previous coaching experience with the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets and the UCLA Bruins at the university level. The team's mascot was a black Labrador retriever named Alien, who was known for charging the field and retrieving the kicking tee following each kickoff.
The Mad Dogs tried to copy the Baltimore Stallions' blueprint by getting staff and players who had previous CFL experience. As part of that blueprint, the Mad Dogs hired former CFL coach Adam Rita to become their new offensive coordinator. Rita was mostly known for coaching the Toronto Argonauts and the Edmonton Eskimos to Grey Cup championships in 1991 and 1993. The Mad Dogs then signed veteran QB Damon Allen, who won the Grey Cup with the Eskimos in 1987 and 1993 (the latter with Rita), earning Grey Cup MVP honors in both years. Other notable players on offense included Eddie Brown (SB), Joe Horn (WR) and former NFL kicker Donald Igwebuike.
However, the offense was only able to score a total of 346 points, last in the CFL behind the Ottawa Rough Riders. On a positive note, the Mad Dogs were known for their strong defensive work that was rated second, behind Edmonton, in the CFL for giving up the least number of points with 364, due in large part to the strong defensive play of Tim Cofield and Rodney Harding.
One of the reasons for poor offense and great defense was the size of the field. The Liberty Bowl was not as well suited to the Canadian game as most U.S. stadiums. The stands were very close to the field of play, making it difficult to reconfigure the field to CFL standards. As a result, even with the addition of AstroTurf cutouts to widen and lengthen the field, it was still narrower and shorter than all other CFL fields, including those other US fields which were not regulation. In fact, it was not even close to regulation length; in order to shoehorn even an approximation of a Canadian field onto the playing surface, the end zones became half-grass/half-Astroturf pentagons that were only nine yards long in the middle and seven yards long at the sidelines. CFL rules dictate a 20-yard end zone and no other stadium had end zones shorter than 15. The stands jutted into the corners of the end zones, creating a clear safety hazard.
Memphis ended the 1995 CFL season with a 9–9–0 regular season record, which placed them fourth in the South Division and one game out of the playoffs.