Rodgers 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 Ehrhart, the Showboats' general manager, in the same capacity.

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.

Other notable players on offense included Eddie Brown (SB), Joe Horn (WR) and former NFL kicker Donald Igwebuike.

However, he often made uncomplimentary remarks about the Canadian Football League, which also showed signs that the CFL's foray into the United States was doomed to failure from the start.

Smith realized that the Mad Dogs could not hope to draw respectable crowds if they had to go head-to-head with high school games on Fridays and Tennessee Volunteers and Ole Miss Rebels football on Saturdays.

With this in mind, Smith and Barracudas owner Art Williams persuaded the CFL to let their teams play late-season home games on Sundays.

As early as September, Smith was blaming community indifference and outright hostility from the media for the team's steep decline at the gate.

Due to massive losses and the late-season attendance collapse, the Mad Dogs folded at the December 1995 CFL meetings.

[6] By February 1996, the Barracudas, Texans and Shreveport Pirates had also folded while the Stallions had reconstituted themselves as the third incarnation of the Montreal Alouettes, ending the CFL's three-year experiment south of the border.

If successful, it could have set Memphis up to make another bid on the expansion franchise that was to be awarded in the wake of the Cleveland Browns relocation controversy (what eventually became the Houston Texans).

Due to Memphians' unwillingness to support a lame-duck team and Nashvillians' reluctance to travel on Interstate 40 to see "their" team play, Oilers games didn't draw much more than the Mad Dogs had drawn even on a good day and often drew more opponents' fans than Oilers fans.