Photo courtesy Green Bay Packers Packer's Head Coach Mike Sherman

Football is an incredibly big deal in the United States. More than 86 million Americans watched the four-hour-long 2005 Super Bowl game.

Imagine that you're watching a National Football League (NFL) game on TV. What you see on the field are 11 people for each team. The interesting thing is that those 11 people are the tip of a very big iceberg. Sitting on the bench are 42 other players on the same team. There are eighteen different coaches who work with the players, and there are more than 200 other people on the team as well. They support all of the players and coaches and make sure that the "business" side of the team is working. In other words, an NFL team is much bigger than the 11 players you see on the field. It takes hundreds of people to keep those 11 people going.

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of an NFL team? What does everyone do? What do the players do during the week to stay in such great shape? How much money does a team make, and where does all that money go? We discovered the answers to these and many other questions when we visited the Green Bay Packers during training camp.

Having a Ball In a normal game, the team needs 36 balls (in the Super Bowl, they actually use a new ball on every play -- more than 100 balls). It takes three days to prep the balls for the game. The first step is a wash down. Then the balls go to the buffing machine. They are dried off, and then the process repeats seven times on each ball. Once they are ready, the quarterbacks try out and approve the balls. Then the referees code the balls with a pen to prevent substitution, and the balls are carefully guarded before the game.