NEW YORK -- From rooms nicknamed "The Palace," "The Horseshoe" and "The War Room," all the intensity of the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship is brought into American homes, hotels and restaurants through an intricate process filled with just as much madness as that being experienced on the court.

While sports fans are enthralled annually with the huge upsets or the dramatic buzzer-beating shots, CBS Sports makes all the signature moments of the nation's best-known tournament appear seemingly effortless. But it isn't.

With about 250 workers in its New York-based broadcast center and another 500 at the eight first- and second-round sites across the country, CBS officials handle at a dizzying pace all of the decisions and technical aspects of an event that has become a national obsession. The hours are long and the reactions need to be quick and precise so that fans -- and sponsors and companies that purchase air time to promote their products -- are pleased.

It's a unique challenge unlike any other, according to those at CBS who have produced the sights and sounds of the NCAA tournament since 1982. For many sports fans, there is nothing like the single-game-elimination format of the tournament in terms of sheer drama in athletics. At the same time, in the world of network television, it is certain that no other event stirs the type of creative and technical challenges it takes to produce a broadcast.

"These first four days are the most complex we face in sports," said Sean McManus, the president of CBS Sports. "The Super Bowl is easy. It's a football game. You have more cameras, more tape machines, more personnel -- but it's still a football game. If you follow the ball, you're not going to get in trouble.

"Here you have four games (on Thursday) leading into four more games with a little bit of a break. Then you have four games leading into four more games and you do the same thing (on Friday). The complexity, operationally and organizationally, is more than any other event. Other than the Olympics, it's probably the most complicated four-day production there is. The Olympics is similar because you have so many venues, but everything else takes different kinds of talent. It's not as organizationally challenging as this event is."

Roll 'em

On the first day of this year's first-round games, CBS officials granted The NCAA News access to their broadcast studio operations for a behind-the-scenes look at how they put a method to the madness.

The first day of the tournament, which happens to be St. Patrick's Day, begins with a series of meetings five hours before viewers see Studio 43 at noon Eastern time. That is where host Greg Gumbel and analysts Clark Kellogg and Seth Davis preview the action for the initial foray into the tournament.

Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky in Indianapolis are the first two teams to tip off at 12:20 p.m. The remaining three games are staggered to start over the next 25 minutes.

Senior studio producer Eric Mann is the person who spearheads all the communication. Over the course of the day, he's talking to around 120 people, including McManus and on-air talent in the studio and at game sites. He also is in contact with directors and technical people throughout the country.

"Here, every minute we're taking people around to different games in different markets," said Mann, who has worked on the NCAA tournament for 24 years. "It's constant, unlike football, from the moment the games tip off until they end around midnight."

One of the busiest times is when the four games in a given window filter in for halftime shows. At that point, Gumbel, Kellogg and Davis are receiving information from a 20-
to-25-person research staff on the progress of all the games. At the first break, Kellogg wants to know how Niagara is staying close with Oklahoma. An anonymous voice points out that Juan Mendez is the key reason. Kellogg is telling anyone in the studio who's listening how much he likes the versatile skills of the Niagara forward.

Seconds before a live audience sees the trio, Davis asks, "How many points does (Oklahoma's) Kevin Bookout have?" He receives his answer immediately and the countdown commences. All goes quiet on the set.

Gumbel welcomes the viewers and he, Kellogg and Davis review the action of the games in the highlights package, which comes from a room known as "The Palace," where the highlights are recorded and queued. Viewers also are taken to the other sites to get a flavor of games from which they only have seen score updates so far. CBS officials call this technique "walking the dog."

Each of the four audiences is brought into the studio at different times, which makes for a few frantic moments on the set. However, it all manages to go flawlessly.

During the halftimes, Gumbel takes particular pleasure in saying the name of Pacific senior forward Guillaume Yango, who is from Paris. Gumbel shouts out the name every time Yango appears in a highlight.

Kellogg also tells the basketball public about the versatility of Niagara's Mendez, whom many viewers may be unfamiliar with since he plays in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference.

When all of the games have resumed, Kellogg goes through a stretching routine. It helps him stay loose both physically and mentally.

He also has a great chemistry with the research staff.

"I'm pumped," says Kellogg, who is in his ninth year working as a full-time studio analyst for CBS during the tournament. "I like to know why things are happening, and that's my job. I can't just spit numbers out. I have to be able to tie them into why things are going on. What's the difference? Is some guy carrying the team? Is somebody turning the ball over? What style is working? I need to know why because that's what the viewers want to know.

"People who aren't watching those games want to know why Wisconsin-Milwaukee is on top of Alabama right now. It's because of their three-point shooting and their great defense. Why is Alabama coming back now? Well, they were able to get the ball inside and they picked up their defense. I'm always asking myself why is something happening. Why? Why? Why?"

The research staff sits to the right of the stage off the set and has someone monitoring every game. They are ready with any type of information to help their on-air colleagues.

"Work is a relative term," said Bruce Schein, the head of research. "When you're watching sports, and you're doing it for a living, I don't want to say it's like stealing money, because it's a grind sometimes. But it's a labor of love. If you love sports and you're working in it, it's a pretty ideal situation."

Kellogg has developed a reputation of being a smooth broadcaster with the gift of creating catch phrases such as "spurtability."

"I've got a library of them from the 15 years I've been broadcasting," Kellogg said. "There are some I've never used. If they don't fit, I never force them. When they fit, I dribble them out there."

Even though he's on-air talent, Kellogg isn't as fashion conscious as his counterparts. He said he doesn't put a lot of thought into what suit he's going to wear from day to day.

"Greg is the only one that cares," Kellogg said. "I just take the next suit in my closet. Greg has to coordinate his stuff. Me, it's whatever is next in line. I freaked (Gumbel) out the other day when I asked him what color he was wearing. He thought I was serious. He's into it. You can tell by the way he looks. He's always so tight."

Gametrax debut

One of the innovations this year designed to catch viewers' eyes is the "Gametrax" graphic that appears at the top of the screen. While one part of the nation is watching its primary game, fans can see up-to-the second updates of the other three games that are being played.

In years past, CBS placed a box in the upper left-hand corner of the screen that rotated scores of the other games. The key to the Gametrax project was having a graphic on the screen that didn't distract the audience or the on-site directors.

"We've been doing this for a long time, and with the basketball scenario, it really needed to be at the top of the screen," said Ken Aagaard, the CBS senior vice-president of operations and production services. "We still have the clock and score on the bottom right, so we had no place to go but up top. There was a lot of experimenting going on, even over the last two days (before the start of the tournament). We wanted to get it in the right scan lines up top."

The new presence at the top of the screen can be put in place or taken away through the push of a button in coordination rooms located in the New York broadcast center.

At one point in Coordination Room 22, associate director Myriam Leger asked for the Gametrax to be removed, and -- poof -- it disappeared, as the final seconds of the Wisconsin-Milwaukee's upset win over Alabama ticked off the clock.

Each game is assigned a "flex" and "constant" coordination room, in which staff monitor game action and commercials. There are up to six people in any of the small rectangular-shaped rooms where darkness prevails to accentuate the brightness of the monitors, lights and pieces of equipment.

"They are really the guts of the operation," Aagaard said. "They are rolling all the commercials and they are switching to Studio 43 for updates. As we switch from game to game, they are done through these co-ord rooms as well. Way back when, six or seven years ago when we got the NFL, this is where we spent our money. These rooms are easily $600,000 to $700,000 apiece. We're going to have to upgrade them to High Definition now. It's going to be a big move for us."

Aagaard is a man who puts out the fires when they occur at the game sites. In mid-afternoon on March 17, he's taken the time out to give a tour of the operation, which includes a visit to a room known as "The Horseshoe," where all the games and news conferences are taped.

The fact that he is able to explain important parts of the information is a strong indication that everything is running smoothly.

"When my phone rings, it's probably a bad thing," he said.

While the new Gametrax graphic provides instantaneous updates, it also can fuel criticism. No matter when McManus makes the decision to switch viewers from one game to another, someone is going to be upset that they aren't seeing what they want at a particular time.

Complaint calls and e-mails aren't necessarily seen as a negative, because it shows the passion the audience has for the product.

"It will put more pressure on us to (make the right choices)," McManus said. "A lot of times it's physically impossible to show two games that are winding down simultaneously. The criticism we do get is almost always totally unfounded. We will get criticized for going to a game with 14 seconds left and then a coach calls a timeout. People say, 'I can't believe they switched just before a timeout,' as if anybody in the world knew.

"Or we'll switch to a game that's a six-point game, and the team will hit two three-pointers and now it's a 12-point game. People will accuse us of switching to a game that became a blowout. They believe we made a mistake by doing that. It's absurd. We're not perfect."

Coordinating commercials

During the first and second rounds, there are four games being played in the same window with each part of the country designated to receive a primary game.

Within each region, a game is then split into audiences that will receive the game constantly and another that will have a more flexible window. For the latter audience, if that game becomes a blowout, McManus, CBS Executive Producer Tony Petitti and Senior Vice-President of Programming Mike Aresco confer in the control room to decide if the flex audience should be switched to a different game.

For example, the Illinois-Fairleigh Dickinson game was shown to 32 percent of the country on the night of March 17. The constant audience, which included the entire state of Illinois, all of New York and New Jersey, and parts of Missouri and Indiana, consisted of 13 percent of the country. The other 19 percent of that audience consisted of viewers who were switched later on to the West Virginia-Creighton game, which was more competitive.

Eventually every region in the country was watching the end of the West Virginia-Creighton match-up that was decided in the final seconds.

McManus tries to use a simple train of thought when it comes to making the decision on what the most intriguing game is taking place and when to switch the action. His thinking is along the lines of what he would want to see if he was sitting at home at the time.

There are several factors that come into play when the decision is made to take an audience away from its primary game.

"A lot of times it takes two or three minutes to set up the satellites to make a move," McManus said. "People say you should switch to a game immediately. Well, we have one studio and sometimes it is doing a halftime for somebody else, doing a cut-in for somebody else or perhaps a report. It's not like we can say go, go, go. We have to set the satellite and the coordinates, and it takes time."

Another factor that has to be considered is the effect a switch has on the commercials, which is where the revenues are generated.

"The commercials have to run in a certain order because some advertisers have exclusivity in certain areas," said Aresco, who also worked for ESPN when it broadcast the first-round games in the 1980s and early 1990s. "You wouldn't want to run two car ads back to back. They wouldn't be happy with us if we had a Honda or Buick ad back to back. There is a lot of coordination required."

Chris Simko, CBS' senior vice-president of sales and marketing, and his staff are assigned to make sure all of the advertisements appear in their proper broadcast window. Simko and his crew are in the "Multipurpose Room," located by the entrance of the control room where McManus is overseeing matters.

"We're dealing with four games in a window, which is always tough," Simko said. "The timing never matches up the way you want it to. We get these spurts and bursts of activity. At the start of this window, we only had the Indianapolis site up and running. The other tip-offs hadn't happened, yet. We get ahead of ourselves a little bit and everybody was on that one game, which was the Cincinnati-Iowa game. Then all of sudden you start pulling audiences out to three different tip times. Now you get into the chaos of the commercial world."

The commercials are set in blocks, and Simko's crew keeps track of the percentages of each set of advertisements to ensure their clients are receiving the right amount of air time. It's all done the old-fashioned way of verbal communication, along with the aid of pencils and pads.

While it seemed like a hectic atmosphere, things went well during the day session on March 17.

"I'm not sure anybody could create a computer program to track this stuff," Simko said. "There is such a human element to it. That was relatively calm."

One of the biggest sighs of relief comes when all of the day games are over. Only then do Simko and his staff take a moment for a bathroom break and something to eat before heading back to their positions for the night broadcast windows.

With the hours being so long, the CBS workers root for close games to keep the staff in top form. The first day of the tournament wasn't as dramatic as they would have liked, but things picked up on the second day when Bucknell upset Kansas and Vermont eliminated Syracuse.

Despite the Congressional hearing involving steroid use in Major League Baseball and a marquee NBA game involving former teammates Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, the ratings for the entire weekend were the highest since 1994.

The game involving LSU and UAB is the last game to end at 12:13 a.m. Gumbel, Kellogg and Davis sign off three minutes later.

"We get a couple of hours sleep then we're right back at it," Mann said. "There is nothing greater in the month of March than this tournament. The whole country is talking about it for the whole month."