Written by Matt Vann

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No, not those Vikings. Not the ones whose game Sunday was cancelled because their Hefty tall kitchen can liner of a roof broke from excessive snow load. The real ones. The Norwegian kind.

My job takes me to plenty of out of the way places, but few are as far out of the way as Stavanger Norway. Despite being located on the south west coast of the country, Stavanger is still precariously close to Arctic Circle, which means it lies within a couple degrees latitude of 24 hours of darkness in the winter months. A sunrise at 09:30am and rapid setting 6 hours later doesn’t provide much available daylight, especially when skies are continually gray. Football is of the soccer variety, and the expat sports bar has yet to be opened in a city of 300,000 residents. Needless to say, when my flight touched down at 4:30pm local time, in complete darkness, my mood was less than stellar.

I am very accustomed to traveling during the NFL season, and it has never really bothered me, most likely because the typical Browns year was an exercise in futility. Other than “run William run” and the hallucination of 2007, being away from the NFL Sunday Ticket was never a big deal – I’d “watch” the game on the web, if at all, and catch up on what I had missed, which was never much, the following day.

But things are different now. Now there is hope, which is not a game plan but does make watching the games more enjoyable. The 2010 draft looks like what happens when you have a real Front Office, Mangini, for all his faults, seems to have the support of the team, and the guys go out every Sunday and play their butts off. So I decided that I would demonstrate, in a karmic sort of way, my support for this new and improved version of the Cleveland Browns. I would not mail it in when it came to following the game against the Bills. I would fight to the end, as the team surely would against the Buffalo, to do everything possible to keep tabs on the action and prove my loyalty.

There are times when I am a complete moron. This was one.

The time difference between Cleveland and Stavanger is six hours. The airport, while modern, is more regional in size so immigration, baggage claim, and customs are a breeze. Hop in a taxi for the 15 minute $65 fare to my grossly overpriced hotel, and I was checked in ready to show my idiotic allegiance in plenty of time to figure out how to watch the game. First stop was Google, which quickly lead me, after a few minutes of reading, to several different streaming technologies and sites from which I could watch the game on my laptop. Sounds easy, right? Actually, it is. Some methods are free and quasi-legal, some are subscription-based and available from NFL.com. It sometimes takes 10 minutes to buffer the signal before it begins to play, so I had some time to figure out what to do for dinner. Room service was the obvious choice as the game was going to start. The majority of Norwegians speak English well, so a call down to the front desk was straightforward. No room service on Sunday nights. We can order a pizza for you. There is a flyer in your room. Ok, football and pizza (even the Norwegian variety) go well together, so why not? I looked at the advertisement on the desk. A medium cheese and pepperoni, delivered to my room, was NKr 265. After a quick bit of arithmetic I realized this was in the neighborhood of $44. Unless it was delivered with a 12 pack of Great Lakes Christmas Ale that price seemed a bit excessive, even if I would be reimbursed.  No problems – this is Browns football and sacrifices must be made. The mini-bar had peanuts.

We all know the result by now; there isn’t really much left to analyze. The Browns O-Line struggled to get up to the second level against the Bills, whose linebackers ran free all day and made a ton of plays. Obviously, all 1,643 NFL players not on the Browns know to try and strip Hillis of the ball. Even when Delhomme can buy a bit of time his throw are wildly inaccurate and wide outs just cannot get enough separation. It looked as if the Bills played man coverage the majority of the time with a single safety. We couldn’t beat it. Depressing doesn’t begin to describe it.

Initially caught up in the excitement of actually getting to watch the game, I failed to realize the magnitude of my mistake until very late in the fourth quarter. Jet lagged, away from the family, on a Sunday night in December I sat in a cramped hotel room near the Arctic Circle hunched over my laptop watching a low resolution pixelated feed of one of the worst football games in the history of team sports. What is wrong with me?

Hopefully nothing that can’t be fixed by winning the next 3 games.