Inside ESPN's Busiest Week Ever: The Mayweather-Pacquiao Fight and Beyond

The Fight of the Century, the NFL Draft, the Kentucky Derby, and NBA and NHL Playoffs. The World Golf Championships in San Francisco, NASCAR at Talladega, and MLB matchups including the latest entry in the Red Sox/Yankees rivalry in Boston.

With a packed schedule that is centered around the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao bout in Las Vegas and spans multiple cities for major sports world events, it’s no surprise that none of ESPN’s 21 editions of SportsCenter will take place at its Bristol headquarters this week.

“It’s Christmas in Las Vegas,” Rob King, ESPN Senior Vice President of SportsCenter and News, tells Yahoo TV. “I used to always say that the early part of April was the best time of the year, because you would have the Final Four followed closely by the start of Major League Baseball. There are some years that it also included anticipation of the Masters, so that was always a fun week.

“What’s different is, the NFL moved its draft to a different part of the month, to a different city [Chicago]. We knew that we were going to have a pretty active week, and then the fight was announced. This is unlike any week I can remember, though. I mean, the diversity of the events, the number of people who are both avid and casual fans who will have an eye on something having to do with sports, the degree of sports programming that’s going to happen everywhere, and then the enormity of what SportsCenter is going to try to do. It’s special.”

Related: Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao Combined for $1.6 Billion in PPV Sales

And, without the assistance of cell phones, tablets, laptops, and the dozens of monitors and TV screens King has in his Bristol headquarters and home offices, it would also be a logistical nightmare, with — see the infographic above — ESPN’s Vegas coverage alone requiring hundreds of hotel rooms, three swimming pool sets, three forklifts, two dozen cameras, a SportsCenter on the Road bus, and, for SportsCenter anchor Lindsay Czarniak, two flights — between cities more than 1,500 miles apart — in one day.

“I will hop a flight from Vegas early in the morning, and get to Chicago midday, and then I will be there to do [SportsCenter] at 6,” Czarniak says, describing her itinerary for April 30, aka NFL draft day. “Then I’ll hop on a flight back to Vegas, because we have early morning shoots on Friday.”

Czarniak says, in addition to the actual event coverage throughout the week, she’s most excited about the special packages and human interest features the network will air — the kind of behind-the-scenes, sometimes quirky coverage that makes the most of the access ESPN is granted for all the week’s athletic happenings, and acknowledges that programming like the fight and the Kentucky Derby draws viewers who may not be regular scores and stats-type viewers.

Related: Mayweather-Pacquiao: How Trainers and Former Foes Would Approach Fight

That will include, for example, a look at the very pricey, customized mouthguards Mayweather commissions for his matches. How much can a mouthguard possibly cost?

“We did [a feature] on the $25,000 mouthguard that Mayweather wears,” Czarniak says. “We shot it in New York with his dentist, who makes it. That kind of off-the-wall thing — it’s not just that one mouthpiece costs that much, but it’s the amount of time that the dentist puts into it, meaning all the flights back and forth to fit it. It’s very entertainment-ish, but there is a true science behind it, which I find fascinating. It’s not just about the way it looks, but it’s also about the psychology of it: what Mayweather wants to think of [during the fight], and for him, a lot of that is money.”

But Czarniak, a SportsCenter anchor since 2011, also can’t wait to see the spectacle in Vegas. “That’s the most interesting thing, just to see the people who turn out for this. When I was in Los Angeles right after they announced the fight was going to happen, it was like the Oscars. It was the red carpet laid out, and all the buzz. That, to me, is part of what makes this so intriguing,” she says. “That’s a big part of our coverage, too. It’s the people that are going to be in Vegas: a lot of folks that we don’t have access to necessarily in Bristol, a lot of actors, musicians, people like that. So yeah, it’s going to be a wild week, but it’ll be fun.”

And then there’s always the unanticipated events, the upsets and the breaking news stories that are likely to unfold throughout the week, which, King acknowledges, is part of the fun that even the network’s 50-page project plan binder for this week in sports can’t predict.

“That’s the thing about our craft. You can plan and plan and plan, but something else is going to happen. We have a very important dual responsibility: The first is to manage the utility of something like this, and by that I mean the nuts and bolts, the planning, the scheming, the logistics,” King says. “Then it is also our job to convey the wonder, because that’s the thing that really holds people: Who’s going to win? Why did this happen? Where did this come from? How did this happen? What’s next? That wonder part is a part that we really take a lot of pleasure in, and I think right now we’ve spent a lot of time with the utility, and we’re just ready for it to happen.”