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Decades later, the CFL’s decision to stake out seven American outposts is seen mostly as grounds for embarrassment. The Memphis Mad Dogs’ end zones were too small. Shreveport Pirates players slept above a barn at training camp one year. After handing Parks a microphone at their first home game, the Posse proceeded to draw so few fans that their final home game was moved to Edmonton.

And yet, for every torturous memory it spawned, U.S. expansion actually did a lot of good.

“It was conceived, I think, because the league had the perception it was falling apart,” said Canadian football author Frank Cosentino, whose books A Passing Game and Home Again touch on the CFL’s American years.

The CFL started thinking hard about crossing the border around 1991, when Los Angeles Kings owner Bruce McNall — backed by Wayne Gretzky and John Candy — purchased the Toronto Argonauts. The league needed cash: its year-end deficit of $2 million had nearly doubled since the previous December.

Its solution, spearheaded in 1992 by new commissioner Larry Smith, was to target American cities overlooked by the NFL. In all, investors from Vegas to Sacramento to Birmingham, Ala. paid a combined CDN$14.3 million in expansion entrance fees.

“About four of eight franchises were in big-time financial difficulty,” Smith recalled in an interview. “The expansion was basically the result of the owners saying, ‘We’ve got to do something.’ That was my job.”