[sports|history] You know what I haven't done in a while? Given a rambling history lesson on a topic absolutely nobody on here cares about, but maybe you should, because this is hilarious. I present the history of the shortest-lived and worst-managed football team I've ever heard of, the Las Vegas Posse.
Now, to explain why the Canadian Football League had a team in Vegas, I need to explain the CFL's American expansion experiment. You see, leading up to the 1980s, the CFL and NFL were on pretty equal ground. But then came very lucrative TV and sponsorship deals for the American league, and suddenly the NFL was making way more money.
The CFL wanted some of that money, and while they made some inroad getting on US TV during the NFL strike of '82, that didn't pull in good enough ratings because why would Americans watch a sport where they weren't in it?
On top of that, the league was struggling to make enough money to survive in the late '80s and early '90s, and a bunch of venture capitalists took over ownership of a lot of teams that had previously run for decades just casually and not looking for profit. And where was the money? The NFL.
So, in the early '90s, the league - mostly people like Bruce McNall, who was running the Toronto Argonauts into the ground and would soon be arrested for smuggling and defrauding a bunch of banks, but that's another story - thought that creating a third division full of American teams might be the way to go.
In 1993, they tested this out by adding one US team, the Sacramento Gold Miners (and also the San Antonio Texans, but they wouldn't actually play until 1995 -- long story there).
The team didn't perform as well as they'd hoped, but it wasn't enough of a disaster to prevent them from adding a handful of more US teams in 1994, forming the South Division to go along with the West and East Divisions.
Now, the first thing you'll note is that the Posse played in an existing stadium: the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl, which was used for college and high school football and later used for the XFL. Sure, fine, saving on real estate and not having to build a new stadium, right?
One, the existing field was regulation for American football, not for the separate rules of the Canadian game. American fields are too short by 30 yards and too narrow by about 13 yards. This meant that games played in Sam Boyd had to adjust for that.
Now, we do have other fields in the league that have to accommodate for a shared space, like Montreal's arena where there's a running track around the field, but that only cuts into part of the endzone. Not whatever the heck the US thinks it's doing.
Two, if you're familiar with this stadium, you'll know that it is outdoors. In the desert. Which isn't exactly ideal for a league that plays in summer.
It's often stated that the coaches were allowed to attend practice with no shirt, no shoes, and booty shorts to keep from getting heat stroke out there. The players, of course, were not.
Now, if the stadium were the only problem, they could probably just fix that when they got up the money to do so. Heck, other US CFL teams also played on short fields with an eye toward getting their own regulation stadium when they could, although they weren't baking in the desert. But the Las Vegas Posse had many other issues.
First off, it seemed that some of the players and even the staff had no idea how to play the game. Sometimes a ref would signal for a rule that didn't exist in Canadian football, thus screwing over the team when their more familiar opponents kept on going.
This is important. The CFL has always struggled against other entertainment options. Their most popular markets are traditionally Saskatchewan, which has no NHL team, and Edmonton, where even there they're widely eclipsed by the Oilers. And Vegas has a lot of other entertainment options.
So when their attendance started sucky and got worse, they tried to advertise with cheerleader fanservice. That didn't work. Plenty of that in Vegas already.
Even with all of that, their highest attendance number was around 14K people, when the average low for the league was a little over 11K, and their lowest was 2K.
Going back to the cheerleaders, there was another famous incident where the head coach sent them to hang around behind the opposing team's bench. The thought process was that the players would get distracted and horny and wouldn't pay attention to their instructions. That not only didn't go as planned, but the Posse still lost the game.
They also had a mascot! Well, multiple mascots. They looked at Calgary, which has an actual live horse that they bring onto the sidelines, and decided to do them one better, bringing out a whole team of horses. This was another one of their selling points, and probably a better idea than a traditional mascot given the aforementioned heat issue.
Of course, that many horses meant they had to hire someone specifically to shovel all the horse crap on the sidelines. Maybe they should have just gotten a really air-conditioned fursuit after all.
There was another very famous incident in which they hired someone to sing the Canadian national anthem before the game... who didn't actually know the national anthem.
The lyrics are wrong, the melody is worse, he segues into "O Christmas Tree" for a minute there, and it was bad enough that it made the news and the team received an admonishing letter from Jean Chretien, who you'd think would be busy doing prime minister things.
By the end of the season, the Posse was bringing in abysmal numbers and it wasn't worth continuing. Reportedly, the staff couldn't even afford paper by this point, much less things like proper cold-weather gear for the players when they had away games. So they announced just before their last game that they were going to fold the team.
So because they were failing so badly and were already trying to leave their stadium, in an attempt to get better numbers, the league moved their last game to Edmonton at the last minute.
By which I mean the last minute. Numerous Edmonton fans were already on their way to Vegas, and Air Canada couldn't get them back home on such short notice.
In the end, a bunch of Edmonton season ticket holders who had found themselves in Las Vegas had to head into the Imperial Palace, which had trucked in a bunch of Canadian beer and set up a ballroom to watch the game on TV.
So that was the one sad, short year of the Las Vegas Posse. But they had one more blunder after - and most likely because - they couldn't wash their hands of their failure fast enough.
All of the Posse's players were put into a dispersal draft in 1995 to go to other teams. However, one of their backbenchers, Derrick Robertson, had died in an accident in the break between seasons.
Because the team was gone and didn't have anything left, there was no one to report it to the league, so the league put him into the draft, Ottawa drafted him and couldn't find him, and then they had to have the awkward conversation when they finally found out he was dead.
So that's the wild story of the team that lasted a year, could only advertise on T&A or not at all, sweltered in the summer desert heat while their coaches ran around in booty shorts, reportedly cashed their paycheques at a casino with all the poor decisions that implied, and had a national anthem performance so bad it became an international incident.
A couple years back, the CFL actually made a line of American expansion team merchandise, though it isn't in stores anymore. But for a brief while in the 2010s, you could get a Las Vegas Posse shirt specifically for the purpose of spotting sports history nerds in the wild by seeing who burst out laughing.
In the desert.
Which isn't exactly ideal for a league that plays in summer.