CFL USA - 1995: Turmoil and Termination

1995: Turmoil and Termination

In 1995, the American franchises were split off into their own South Division. The Gold Miners' problems with Hornet Stadium prompted a move to San Antonio, where they were reincarnated as the San Antonio Texans, while the Birmingham Barracudas and Memphis Mad Dogs (previously the Memphis Hound Dogs, a rejected NFL franchise), were added. Teams were also considered for Orlando and Miami. The latter would have been nicknamed the Manatees, and an exhibition game between Birmingham and Baltimore was held in Miami to gauge support. The Miami expansion was eventually abandoned.

However, American fan interest in Canadian football, with the exception of Baltimore, was sparse at best. Teams like Birmingham and Memphis began with promising crowds comparable to their Canadian counterparts, but saw attendance plummet with the onset of the college football season. The CFL has long played on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights--the same days that college football teams play. At the end of the year, which saw the Stallions become the first non-Canadian team to win the Grey Cup, the Barracudas and Pirates had already announced that they were leaving their hometowns before the Grey Cup had even been played. Cities such as Montreal, Los Angeles, and Norfolk were mentioned as possible sites for the relocated franchises, with the Birmingham team being moved to Shreveport. However, shortly after, commissioner Larry Smith ordered the Barracudas, Mad Dogs and Pirates shut down.

In October 1995, the NFL's Cleveland Browns announced they were moving their roster to Baltimore to play as the Ravens the following year. While the Stallions had been a runaway hit, Speros knew they could not hope to go head-to-head with an NFL team and decided to move elsewhere. He began talks with Richmond, Virginia, but nothing could be worked out. The Stallions team moved to Montreal and became the third incarnation of the Montreal Alouettes. Unwilling to remain as the sole U.S.-based team in the league, and faced with the prospect of having their nearest opponent being over 1,500 miles away, the Texans voluntarily folded soon afterward. As a result, the entire league was once again based in Canada for the 1996 CFL season.

The last vestiges of the CFL's American experiment were erased when Speros sold the Alouettes to Bob Wetenhall after the 1996 season. The fact that Baltimore, an American team, had won a championship that was a symbol of Canadian culture, was the subject of much consternation and lamentation at the time. As such, the CFL has refused to acknowledge the Alouettes' Baltimore connections and reckons the Stallions as a separate team from the current incarnation of the Alouettes. It does, however, reckon the Alouettes as the successors of the original Alouettes franchise.

One of the often cited reasons for the CFL South Division's failure, and part of the reason why the CFL fell behind the NFL in terms of quality players, was the state of the league's American television contract. The league, which had held a U.S. network TV contract in the 1950s and again briefly in 1982, was then being carried on ESPN2, at the time a nascent channel devoted to extreme sports that was not nearly as widely available as its parent network and only carried a limited number of the league's games (with ESPN itself airing some games to fill in airtime available due to the 1994 Major League Baseaball Strike, as well as the Grey Cup on tape delay). It was not until after the 1995 season that the CFL, mainly through the action of its American franchises, began negotiating with CBS Sports (at the time the only of the Big Four that did not have rights to NFL broadcasts) to see if they could get coverage. It would not be until several years later that the CFL got a TV contract in the United States, on a much smaller network (America One).