Before the hits and tackles and meltdowns, before the disputed call that will haunt the state of North Carolina, before a cacophony of harried barking fills the cramped, sweaty truck where ESPN decides what you see on TV, there is just a beige hotel ballroom. It looks like the type of place that normally hosts an annual conference of actuaries. But today, college football is in town.

"Let's have fun and kick some ass."

Nine hours from now, when the ACC Championship game between Clemson and the University of North Carolina kicks off, ABC/ESPN's top crew will have about five conversations at once. From the press box of Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina, Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit will be talking to America about the pair of dynamic starting quarterbacks while producers talk into their earpieces, prepping them to read the Jimmy V Week for Cancer Research promo that's got to roll as they return from the next commercial break. In the truck, there's crosstalk from guys directing specific camera operators toward their targets, while the man in charge of timing counts down the seconds until the next piece of footage goes live as if he were calling out the T-minus of a rocket launch.

ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit doing College Gameday, and looming above the 11 a.m. production meeting at the Westin Hotel. Andrew Moseman

For now, there is no shouting. There are simply 16 people sitting around a table, critiquing every single onscreen graphic of important players and playoff possibilities that millions of fans might see tonight.

Fowler, who will be America's besuited play-by-play man tonight, leans back in a black hoodie. His broadcast partner Herbstreit hovers over the group like a disembodied ghost—he's still doing the grand circus that is ESPN's College Gameday preview show in Indianapolis, which one of the crew members is projecting onto the wall. For a moment, they crane their necks upward and become like the rest of America, waiting to see whose headgear Lee Corso will don before he preens for another crew's camera.

Meeting over. It's time to head to the stadium. "Let's have fun and kick some ass," producer Bill Bonnell says.

The bottom of the production truck. Andrew Moseman

Numbers And Faces

It's 3:30 in the afternoon, more than four hours before game time, and Derek Mobley is leading a huddle down in the stadium's concrete basement behind an impromptu black curtain. Mobley, the director, has his team of camera guys with him to pregame. They know their jobs and their placements around the stadium. This is about the little things. Mobley has been doing these games since the late '90s, long enough to know that any ignored details can cause a broadcast hiccup.

There are so many players on college football teams that some squads have more than one with the same uniform number, so Mobley runs down the list, explaining to the cameramen how to tell them apart—"The linebacker has the long hair." It's tedious. But it's better than Mobley calling on a camera shot of No. 50 and putting the wrong No. 50 on national television. It happens. "It's always the special teams guy that blocks the punt, and there are two 12s," he tells me later. Mobley is prescient about special teams: In the second quarter, Clemson's punter, No. 32, makes a curious decision to run a fake to the left on fourth-and-long; he gets nowhere close, leading to a quick North Carolina touchdown going the other way. The camera guys catch the tight shot of Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney blowing a gasket as he berates the young man on the sideline. Luckily, Mobley's crew doesn't catch the wrong No. 32.

Stevie, the ESPN cameraman, with his facebook. Andrew Moseman

Mobley hands out actual paper face books of the players and the coaches, too. Stevie, the cameraman next to me, is cutting out the faces and gluing them to his one-sheeter, a whole game's production schedule crammed onto an 8.5 by 11.

The team tries to anticipate every shot, including those close-ups of a player's relatives in the stands that you see after he breaks off a big play. "Deshaun Watson's mom is here—we care about her," Mobley says, referring to Clemson's star quarterback, before reading off her section, row, and seat number. The crew gets plenty of chances to put her on television. Watson posts 289 yards passing, 131 rushing, and accounts for five touchdowns. After the game he'll be one of three players invited to New York later this month for the Heisman Trophy ceremony. Mobley wants to get the family of North Carolina quarterback Marquise Williams on camera too, but no luck. "We didn't get that seat," he says.

Spidercam technician Gary Wood delicately polishes the lens before kickoff. Andrew Moseman

The Floater

"I always think it looks like Nomad, the robot from Star Trek."

You may not be as immediately familiar with fictional sci-fi robots as Spidercam technician Gary Wood is. I had to think about it for a second, even though Popular Mechanics recently named Nomad one of the worst fictional bots of all time. But he is correct. The resemblance is striking.

Spidercam (like SkyCam, another company's similar version of this technology) is that camera that flies over the field, suspended by cables connected to the four corners of the stadium. The camera tails the play, offering pre-snap views from behind the quarterback that were impossible just a few years ago, before anybody got the crazy idea to hang a camera over a football field. Making it work requires a lot more math than you might realize.

One of the quartet of 700-lb. winches that control Spidercam Andrew Moseman

In each of those four corners you'll find four winches that anchor the cable keeping Spidercam aloft. Wood takes me to see one. It's just a 700-pound transparent box plunked at the edge of the concourse, with a couple of metal barriers dropped in front of it as if to say "keep away."

The cable runs to a pulley at the very top of the stadium, then out over the stands to the camera. Each winch can let loose more than 1,100 feet of line. These are no mere puppeteer's strings. With four of them working in unison, Wood says, the system can move the camera to just about any point in 3D space, from a minimum height of 12 feet to a maximum of just more than 100 feet, offering those startling overhead views of the players. Fiber optics run down two of the lines, carrying the commands from the two-person crew it takes to fly the Spidercam. The system computes exactly how much line to reel in or let out from each of the four winches to put the camera where the pilot wants it. "All four of the winches solve the solution," Wood says.

"I always think it looks like Nomad, the robot from Star Trek."

Wood, right, examining Spidercam's batteries.

Spidercam can fly at up to 30 miles per hour with startling grace. An hour before game time, after the crew lowers the camera to what will be the Clemson sideline, Wood pops off the hood to reveal not only the four 480-volt lithium-ion batteries that power the system, but also the gyros up high that keep the tall camera pod perfectly stable (it can also turn on motors to stabilize itself if it gets even a tiny bit out of vertical). Nomad, the Star Trek robot, moved around while standing perfectly straight because it was a cheap 1960s TV prop. With Spidercam, there's a mountain of calculations to keep it so still.

Yet the height of 2015 camera tech is no match for something much simpler: the rain. The previous three weeks of ABC Saturday Night Football were played through crappy weather, leaving Spidercam shots bespeckled by droplets. No such concern on this clear, crisp Charlotte night. Wood wipes down the camera lens with a white cloth, and then it zooms away into the evening. Although Spidercam is as tall as a man, its black frame will be hard to find against the backdrop of Clemson orange and Carolina blue once the fans pour in. But Wood will know where it is. While the pilots buzz the cam around the stadium for the next three hours, he'll be tracking the bird in flight to make sure it stays out of trouble.

Sometimes, long after a game he worked, a friend will ask him who won or whether he saw a key play. Sometimes, he can't remember. His eye was in the sky, securing just one of the dozens of cameras that will bring Clemson-UNC to America.

The monitor wall, with producer Bill Bonnell at far left. Andrew Moseman

No Turning Back

At 7:45 p.m. Eastern time, Chris Fowler greets America, but America is not listening. It's the 15 minutes before airtime, when he and Herbstreit run through the three- to four- minute opening, figuring out how much information about Clemson and UNC they can jam into the window. Practice is especially crucial today: After doing ESPN College Gameday from the site of the Big Ten Championship Game in Indianapolis, Herbstreit's plane got stuck in Indiana because of ice, costing him an hour and a half of rehearsal time.

Mobley tells Fowler to fix his tie. "No turning back," Bonnell says. Go time. At 7 seconds on the countdown to airtime, Fowler and Herbie fist-bump.

I'm in the production truck with Mobley and Bonnell. It's hot. You don't notice it at first, because the first thing you notice is the wall of 120 monitors in front of the production team. The raw input overwhelms. Two twin screens in front of Mobley and Bonnell display what's actually appearing on ABC television at that moment. Each of the 20-plus cameras shooting the game pours footage onto the monitors, labeled with either the name of the operator or the camera's nickname, like Joker, Dog, or Jet, plus its identifying number. Bonnell sits next to Mobley; he's in charge of directing all the instant replays. Ringed around them are several more guys in this increasingly balmy box of humanity and electronics.

It's loud in the truck too. To call a new camera angle, Mobley sees its ID number and barks out, "Ready 2. Go 2!" After a play is over he cuts to a new angle every couple of seconds, as fast as he can talk. The calls happen so fast it's hard to even appreciate the virtuosity. I don't know where on the big wall to go with my eyes.

At 7 seconds on the countdown to airtime, Fowler and Herbie fist-bump.

In the first quarter, Clemson starts running a no-huddle offense. The strategy, in which the offense rushes up to the ball after each play rather than gathering in a huddle, is meant to give the defense less time to prepare and substitute. It has the same kind of effect on the production team. Mobley's guys have starting lineups, impact players, and other kinds of onscreen graphics to jam in, and it gets increasingly difficult as there is no dead time between plays. Bonnell is running through two or three replay angles onscreen when the clock man shouts out, "Over the ball!" It means the offense is lined up, ready to run the next play, and the broadcast needs to get back to live action stat. They do, if only just.

"Let's slow the train down here—one thing at a time," Bonnell says. "We have tempo! We can't be dilly-dallying around."

Pylon Cam. Andrew Moseman

Eyes, Everywhere

Each of the gorgeous high-resolution cameras that shoots the ACC Championship game is worth about $100,000, Mobley tells me. Altogether, the network's trucks carry about $10 million of gear to each game.

But Ed Placey's pride and joy is a piece of bright-orange foam with four cameras jammed into it. It's called Pylon Cam, and this, even more than Spidercam, is the hot new thing for Placey, ESPN's director of college football production. When we talk on the phone, he's about to hop on a plane bound for the Bay Area, for ESPN's broadcast of the PAC-12 Championship between Stanford and USC. Ed Placey loves Pylon Cam.

The pylons are these orange foam sticks that stand on end to mark out the corners of the end zones. Hit the pylon with the football and it's a touchdown, as long as the rest of your body hasn't hit the ground or touched out of bounds, and so players vault themselves through the air to reach the pylon before a defender shoves them into the white. Pylon Cam uses tiny cameras embedded within the foam to capture up-close-and-oh-my-god-he's-going-to-hit-us angles of these potentially game-deciding plays. "It looks like a freight train coming at you," Mobley says.

"This is going to give us a definitive look at a hugely important play."

"We used it for the first time in the National Championship Game last year," Placey says. It's wired right in—with its newest version, ESPN crews bury a wire for Pylon Cam about an inch and a half deep the day before the broadcast. The network has just two such systems currently, one for the NFL Monday Night Football broadcast and another for this college football primetime team. It'll be there when Mobley and his crew call one of the College Football Playoff games on New Year's Eve, and again when they do the National Championship game, securing one of the oddest viewpoints from the arsenal of cameras Mobley can call upon. Says Bonnell: "What's going to happen is at some point this is going to give us a definitive look at a hugely important play that's a decision between winning and losing. It's gonna happen. It's only a matter of time."

The same Connecticut company that creates all the pylons for collegiate and professional football custom-builds these for ESPN. "These are custom-poured molds where we provide the cameras and they pour a pylon around it. The cameras stick out of little holes," Placey says. There's even ventilation holes because the cameras get too hot when they're packed into orange foam. Pick one up, Placey says, and you can feel the motors humming.

Spidercam operator sees the national TV feed on his left side, the feed of his camera on the right. Player numbers for both teams are written in marker on tape that rings the monitor. Andrew Moseman

Pylon Cam should tell you two things about the state of football broadcasting. One is that the broadcasters are pushing so hard to add new elements to the experience that they're doing things like embedding tiny cameras inside the game equipment. But the other is that even at ABC/ESPN, it's no longer just about what's on TV. The national broadcast is the prestige product, what the company sees as the ultimate realization of all the cameras on the field and all the skill in the truck. But to behold the truck is to realize that so much more is possible.

The network creeps into this multifeed future. For last year's National Championship between Ohio State and Oregon, ESPN rolled out what it called Megacast, a package of 12 different ways to watch the game. (It may expand Megacast but the specifics haven't been decided yet, Placey says.) There's Command Center, which mixes multiple camera angles on star players and coaches with more statistical overlays. There's the Film Room, where real coaches break down the game in real time. "We're actually contemplating a channel that would be a feed of all the pylon cameras, just so people can take in what our operator basically does—watching over their shoulder," he says.

Deciding how America gets to watch football is not a question of resources. After all, only a tiny percentage of what the graphics team creates or what any given camera operator shoots ever makes it on air. To Placey, the question is, how much is too much? Would America enjoy time in the truck, like I had, watching multiple angles of the same game at once? Or would that be simply overwhelming?

To those who say that viewers can't handle looking at two things at once, Placey disagrees: "I don't look at it that way. I look at it as: Can you present the viewer with options and let their eyes take them where they want to go? Instead of us choosing what you will watch, you get to choose what you will watch. Your eyes are drawn where they're drawn." In this kind of viewing environment, he says, there's no right answer. Whatever you find most compelling on the screen, that's what you're going to look at.

Multifeed viewing is a particularly compelling option for people with giant TVs, Placey says. ESPN's other options, such as Command Center, are targeted at the most hardcore of the hardcore fans, the people who are checking real-time stats and have the engagement with the game to move their eyes between feeds. But make no mistake: The TV show that Bonnell and Mobley produce is the experience in ESPN's eyes. Mobley says that he's not thinking about Megacast or Film Room when he plans the game or hunkers down at his battle station for three and a half hours of madness. He is thinking about producing a great broadcast.

"Instead of us choosing what you will watch, *you* get to choose what you will watch."

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Kick. Bounce. Controversy.

With 3:26 to go in the third quarter, Clemson has pulled ahead to a 35-16 lead. The Tigers own the ball, threatening to put the game permanently out of reach. On first down, Clemson's Deshaun Watson tries to pass to his left. North Carolina defensive lineman Nazair Jones throws up a paw, bats the pass into the air, lunges, and catches the ball for an interception. It's a freak display of athleticism and exactly what the Tar Heels need to stay in the game.

The truck is ablaze. Bonnell is calling out replay angles, one after another. ABC airs a whole bunch of them in succession—the contest comes to a standstill as referees check the replay angles (provided by this crew) to make sure Jones really hit the ground with possession of the ball. "This is our best angle, here," Bonnell says, circling back to the first one he aired, which seems to show the big lineman get his big mitts under the ball. The ref sees the same—the call is confirmed.

Things will not go Carolina's way the next time.

Down 19 in the final quarter and almost done for, UNC scores twice in rapid succession to get within 8—a touchdown and a two-point conversion. The second score comes with only a minute remaining, forcing the Heels to go for the onside kick in a desperate attempt to get the ball back. Kick. Bounce. A Clemson player gets right in front of the ball, but it ricochets off his chest and back toward the Tar Heels' side as players collide in a mass of pads and metal. North Carolina emerges in possession.

Behind the ruckus, there is a penalty flag. Offside.

Here's the rule: The ball gets kicked from the 35-yard line, and if you're on the kicking team, you've got to stay behind that white barrier until the instant your kicker puts shoe to leather. Cross the plane too early and you're offside.

And here's the still:

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UNC's potential playoff push ended right here. pic.twitter.com/yMAT8bafDN — Heel Athletics (@HeelAthletics) December 6, 2015

Carolina fans, both in the stadium and watching at home, are incensed. As the officials huddle, the crew replays this shot right down the line time and time again, between shots of coaches and players looking angry and confused. Over and over.

The view from ESPN's broadcast booth at Bank of America Stadium. Andrew Moseman

Later, after midnight, when all that joyful orange and frustrated blue spills out onto the streets of downtown Charlotte to chug beers and argue over the call, the crew will spend hours doing a teardown. All those cameras, all those wires, everything that's come together over the previous few days goes back in the box. This is the home stadium of the NFL's Carolina Panthers, and though the team has an away game the next day, ESPN's crew has to get gone and give them their field back.

This crew will spend its New Year's Eve in Dallas, broadcasting the national semifinal between Alabama and Michigan State (this Clemson team will be in the other College Football Playoff game earlier that afternoon, against Oklahoma). Mobley tells me he'll probably have ten more cameras to broadcast the Spartans against the Tide, bringing the number up to about 30. The camera-angle tally could be 50 on January 11, when his crew will show America the National Championship game.

At some point before the national title is decided, Pylon Cam could capture the decisive angle of the decisive play that makes the difference between winning or losing. But not tonight. Tonight, it was the sideline cameras—$100,000, high-definition versions of the blue-collar cameras that have been broadcasting football for decades—that provided the best look down the line on the controversial play.

"I want to see where this offsides is, 'cause I didn't see it," Herbstreit tells America during the broadcast. "I didn't either," Fowler replies. Herbstreit then exclaims, "[No.] 30 is the closest, but he's not offside. Nobody's offsides! Unless it was from the other side." The camera crew then shows a reply in which the players on the other side are visible. They don't appear to be over the line either.

But here's the thing: Whether the kicking team is offsides on an onside kick is not a reviewable play. It just isn't. And while ESPN has cameras all over the stadium, including on the 50-yard line and the 20s, there is no camera looking exactly down the 35-yard line where the controversy happens. You just can't have a camera on every single yard marker (yet).

The call on the field stands. UNC tries the kick again. Clemson recovers it. Game over.

All these cameras. All these replays. A robot whizzing overhead on wires, cameras embedded in foam pylons—an unprecedented view of the game. And yet the utterly bizarre and rapturous extravaganza that is major college football still comes down to a few pairs of human eyes.