Memphis Mad Dogs
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| Founded | 1995 |
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| Folded | 1995 |
| Based in | Memphis, Tennessee, United States |
| Home field | Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium |
| Head coach | Pepper Rodgers |
| Owner(s) | Fred Smith |
| Division | South Division |
| Colours | Forest green, gold, maroon, black, and white |
| Uniform | |
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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.
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.
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 team, 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.
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