CHICAGO — It's early Monday morning, a little more than 10 hours until "Monday Night Football" will be broadcast on ESPN to more than 17 million viewers. Outside it's a quiet, cool, overcast fall day with the sun just starting to burn through the clouds, but inside the Buckingham Room on the 11th floor of the Ritz Carlton, the action is already hot and heavy.

This is where the MNF heavyweights are holding their final production meeting to go over everything they have discussed and put together during the previous week for that night's broadcast of the Bears-Packers game at Soldier Field.

The graphics people are showing the group everything they have worked on. The statistics folks are double-checking the numbers and discussing the ones that are most pertinent. The people in charge of the cameras go over the list of key names — Rodgers, Cutler, Urlacher, Matthews — that they need to focus their shots on that night. The talent, namely lead analysts Jon Gruden and Ron Jaworski, are waxing football gospel, highlighting strategy and personnel and what they have gleaned from a week's worth of film study. Play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico, the main voice for the evening, is taking notes and chiming in. And the show's producers and director oversee everything, aware of what each of the 200-plus sets of hands will be involved in for the show, from start to finish.

"It's intense, man, intense," says Jay Rothman, MNF's senior coordinating producer. "The man-hours … it's insanity. If you combine it all, all the people who work on this show, it's sick. It really is."

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.

Everyone is facing toward a TV-DVD setup cued with graphics for the show and toward four large white notepads, each with themes for that night's game written on them. The first one has a heading of "Key Points" with four items listed below: "division game," "rivalry game," "tradition" and "HHM," which stands for the Hispanic Heritage Month that ESPN was honoring that day. The second is a list of scheduled times, noting a 7 p.m. cut-in and the two monologues for the opening sequence at 7:30 — Jaws to talk about Jay Cutler and Mike Martz and Gruden opening with Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy. The third and fourth pads have headings of "Packers Ball" and "Bears Ball" with each team's key personnel listed below.

"I enjoy the production meeting quite a bit," director Chip Dean would say later, "because after four or five days of work and studying, reading notes … it's great to hear Jon and Jaws — Jon is so comical, and Jaws is so unique — just hear these guys talk about what they are seeing, you can't replace that. It doesn't compare to anything leading up to that day."

Unless he's speaking, Jaworski hardly looks up during the meeting. He has a flip card he uses during the game with both teams' players — Bears defense vs. Packers offense on one side, the reverse matchup on the other. A laptop nearby goes mostly untouched. Jaws is surprised that the Packers will have four tight ends active for that night's game. And when a graphic on the TV pops up that Packers WR Greg Jennings is averaging 34.1 yards on his touchdowns over his career, Jaws chimes in. "That's just insane," he said.