We have previously written about the haphazard and wildly unsuccessful expansion efforts the Canadian Football League put in place to reach US audiences in the 1990s.
The short version is that they tried to put teams in non-NFL markets and play most of their games before the NFL season began to avoid competition. What ended up happening is that a handful of teams lost between $1 and $10 million each over the course of about three years. Teams kept folding and moving and trying again elsewhere. But no team had a more absurd journey than the Las Vegas Posse.
After the 1993 CFL season saw relative success from a team called the Sacramento Gold Miners, more cities and teams were planned. The Las Vegas Posse were among the teams created for 1994. While the team had some talented players, including rookie quarterback Anthony Calvillo (who went on to become the league’s all-time leader in passing yards), the stories about this team are surreal.
First, there was an obvious lack of familiarity with the rule differences between the NFL and CFL. This led to a particularly embarrassing moment when a punt returner signaled for a fair catch, then let the ball roll into the end zone for what he thought would be a touchback. That’s not how the CFL works, and the opposing team jumped on the ball for a touchdown. Related to this, and without citing a source, Wikipedia notes that “players openly complained about the apathy of their coaches and teammates.”
But we’re just getting started – and Wiki’s editorializing is just getting warmed up. It gives us this impeccable sentence: “When the Posse started the 1994 season, it was clear that CFL football would not last in Las Vegas.”
Talk about getting off on the right foot. My goodness. Harsh as it may be, however, that sentence proved prescient. On the field, the Posse was pretty bad: They went 5-13 over the course of the season.
Off the field is where the real fireworks happened. The Posse had cheerleaders called the Showgirls who were once ordered by the coach to hang out behind an opponent’s bench and distract the guys. It didn’t work. The Posse lost by 23 to the BC Lions. Later in the season, the Showgirls had bikini contests at halftime to try and boost attendance. It didn’t work.
With all the nearby entertainers, surely they had world-class renditions of the national anthem, right? Well, at the team’s first home game, the performance of “O Canada” was sung to the tune of “O Christmas Tree” because the singer didn’t actually know the tune of the Canadian national anthem.
Okay, well, maybe the city itself would draw fans in? That would make more sense if the games were actually in Las Vegas, but the team played in Whitney, Nevada, a suburb with a 1994 population of about 15,000. It’s close to the city, but the metro area you imagine in 2023 is more than three times the population of what it was in 1994, so there just weren’t that many people to come watch these games.
But the true highlight of this experiment started as the season was winding down. After drawing just 2,350 people to their second-to-last home game, ownership announced it couldn’t do this and that the team would be disbanded. The CFL stepped in and said, “No, you have to finish the season,” so the final home game was moved to Edmonton. It did not help attendance.
Then things got weirder.
Despite already saying “this franchise is done,” ownership managed to find a group from Milwaukee who wanted to buy the team and settle in Wisconsin (maybe as the Doveland Posse?). However, they would be sharing a stadium with the Milwaukee Brewers. A sale agreement was made, but the Brewers didn’t want to share the stadium with a team whose season overlapped with their own and ultimately killed the deal.
Not to be deterred, and despite every American CFL team hemorrhaging money (except Baltimore, which was just losing some money), another deal was reached. This time the team would be moving to… Jackson, Mississippi. Who’s crazy enough to buy a team and move it to Jackson, you ask? Jimmy Buffett. Duh.
So Jimmy Buffett had an agreement in place to buy the team and move them to Jackson. He even hired a front office, including a GM named Eric Tillman and a head coach in Jon Payne (both of whom have/had long CFL careers). But then the Posse raised prices unexpectedly and the deal fell through. Surely that’s the end, right? Nope. Another investor came through, offering an even higher price, but apparently backed out when he realized that he would just lose money every year. This was the first time a sensible decision was made during this process.
And so it ended.
Just kidding. There’s more.
The league suspended the franchise and gave the owner a deadline to sell the team. In the meantime, the players from the Posse were available for a dispersal draft to other teams around the league. Derrell Robertson, a defensive end on the 1994 team, was included in the April 18th, 1995 draft. He was chosen by the Ottawa Roughriders. Why is that notable? Because Derrell Robertson was dead. He died in a car crash in December of 1994, but apparently nobody knew. Forty or so players were available from the former Posse roster and Ottawa managed to choose the one guy who had died.
(Incredible side note: The following year, the Montreal Alouettes selected James Eggink of Northern Illinois in the fifth round of the CFL Draft, only to find out that he was dead. He had died of cancer three months earlier. The Alouettes’ owner acknowledged that this was an embarrassing slip-up, but defended himself by saying “there were 560 names on our draft list. This is not like that Las Vegas situation last year.” Okay, buddy, whatever helps you sleep at night.)
Death is where every story ends, so this feels like we’re wrapping up. Until…
Somehow, after the dispersal draft was over, a potential ownership group from Miami attempted to purchase the remains of the Posse and become the Miami Manatees – they even had a logo made up for their uniforms. But prior to the 1996 season, the CFL decided to close the door on any further USA experimentation. The saga of the Las Vegas Posse was over.
For good.
Seriously. That’s the end.