Keep all of this in mind when you watch Monday night's Patriots-Dolphins contest. What you see during the three-plus hours of the broadcast requires an incalculable amount of work, communication and coordination to put together. The people responsible for the broadcast, more than 95 percent of whom will never appear on camera, must know exactly what will happen at each moment and what every other person is doing — all of which makes the game of calling an unpredictable script of forward passes, turnovers and sideline blowups a ridiculous and volatile task.

Pro Football Weekly spent an entire day behind the scenes watching the inner machinations of a "Monday Night Football" broadcast, especially the things few on the viewing side of the broadcast ever see: inside the production trucks parked in the stadium's underbelly, up in the announcing booth and on the sidelines at different times throughout the day. It's a cavalcade of highly organized, fiercely tense operations that have its employees from top to bottom living and working on the edge — but loving nearly every minute of it.

Here's a timeline of a day in the hectic life of the Monday Nighters:

9:39 a.m.

Twenty-nine people sit in a meeting room around a large oval table filled with coffee cups, half-eaten muffins, plates of fruit, laptops, PDAs, notebooks, stacks of papers and binders — all of the key tools for that morning's prep session. Over the next hour, most of the people in the room will look and listen as a few key voices rise above the others.