"Timing is everything": Behind the scenes of an NFL team's travel day

This piece originally aired on Oct. 9, 2014.

When you turn on an NFL game, you focus on what's happening on the field, but it's unbelievable what happens behind the scenes to get the visiting team there every other week, reports CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford.

They pack up and move not only the players, staff and coaches, but all that gear too, most of which is super-sized.

When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers came from behind to beat the Pittsburgh Steelers with seconds left in Sunday's game, the team's operations manager Tim Jarocki took only a second to celebrate.

For Jarocki, post-game is crunch time.

"As soon as the clock hits zero, I'm sending out a text to everybody, letting them know that the game is over at x time, and buses are rolling in 60 minutes after that," Jarocki explained.

The action behind the scenes in Pittsburgh is months in the making. The planning that starts back home in Tampa is critical to the team's performance on the field, said Buccaneers COO Brian Ford.

"We're dealing with professional athletes that have a job to do, and you want to take the travel and the whole process off of their plate, so they can concentrate on what they're paid to do, and that's win football games," Ford said.

Everything is geared toward helping the players, like setting up TSA screenings at their practice facility instead of the airport.

"We sent 16,000 pounds of equipment," said equipment manager Jim Sorenson. "We basically take a little bit of everything from this room and bring it with us."

This room is Sorenson's domain. Most of it gets packed up and shipped for every road game.

"Most players will have a new pair of shoes and a back-up pair of shoes in their travel bag tomorrow before we leave for Pittsburgh," Sorenson said.

When it's time to go, everything is planned down to the minute, from the equipment truck departure, to the players boarding buses with a police-escorted ride to the Tampa airport.

The next step involves charter coordinator Jeff Lucas and his team at United Airlines.

"We get everything in, we push off the gate and go," Lucas said. "Timing is everything."

But it's not the only thing. He said they're very careful loading in a 300-pound lineman into a coach seat.

"You're kinda sitting in a little box," defensive Tackle Gerald McCoy said.

Mccoy has earned his seat in first class, along with the all the other linemen. It's not only more comfortable for the team's largest players, it's Buccaneers new coach Lovie Smith's way of sending a message about the importance of the men on the front lines.

"It all starts up front, on both sides of the ball, everything we do says that, but you want to acknowledge it with this also," Smith said. "Sitting up in first class lets them know that they're, you know, first class guys."

Once the plane is in the air, in-flight coordinator Larry Warren and his crew take over the meal service, as they do on every Buccaneers flight throughout the season.

The platter includes po' boys, Chick-fil-A burgers -- and that's just the starters.

"They've already started working out, so when they get on the plane, they're hungry," Warren said.

The entire meal is planned by a nutritionist.

There's steak, chicken, shrimp, spinach salad and dessert like frozen fruit bars and Skinny Cow ice cream.

"You wanna make sure they're prepared for the game tomorrow, so we don't want to overdo the sugar intake," Warren said.

When the team landed in Pittsburgh, the players headed to their hotel.

At the same time, Jim Sorenson collected the cargo and immediately drove to Heinz Field, the venue for the next day's game.

"We go from the airport to the stadium and basically set up the locker room," he said. "We'll unpack all the players' bags into their lockers, which is their helmets, their shoulder pads, their shoes, their gloves. We'll also hang the jerseys and pants just to make sure that we didn't forget anything."

Ironically, for the team behind the team, the least-stressful moments of the weekend come when the players first take the field. But that brief calm ends at halftime, when they pack it all back up to take it home.

What took months to plan, wraps up in just over an hour.

And the most amazing fact of all: they do it practically every other weekend.