The Watch Tower

The lights go down, the kickoffs go up, and Mike Pereira is on his feet. Always on his feet.

It’s a Sunday afternoon, and Pereira, who oversees officiating for the NFL, is pacing a high-tech hideaway on the 15th floor of the league’s Park Avenue headquarters. To his left and right are eight league employees, each monitoring a different game via satellite and charting every penalty, injury and controversial or unusual play. In the middle of the room is an eight-by-10-foot movie screen that’s always showing a game. At any moment, when something questionable or interesting happens, one of Pereira’s helpers pushes a button and puts his or her game on the big screen.

The chatter is constant, in keeping with Pereira’s golden rule: When in doubt, shout it out.

“Baltimore’s inside the 10!”

“Jon Ritchie’s hurt on the play!”

“Helmet-to-helmet hit in the Kansas City game!”

The room has blacked-out windows, about $500,000 worth of equipment and crackles with energy -- and not only from the glow of the TV screens, or the blinking of TiVos and state-of-the-art recorders at every monitoring station.

“This,” said Pereira’s right-hand man, Jay Manahan, “is a football fan’s nirvana.”

It’s also serious business. The league, looking for ways to perfect the officiating process, created the room three years ago so that the department’s two top executives, Pereira and Larry Upson, could keep even closer track of what’s happening on Sundays. Pereira and Upson alternate weeks, one working inside, the other traveling to a game to watch in person. Last Sunday, the league gave The Times a rare glimpse into its inner sanctum of officiating, a little-known nerve center buzzing with activity on every game day of the season.

“This place gives me a day’s head start from the fact that I know where the problems are,” said Pereira, who fields phone calls first thing Monday morning from hot-under-the-collar coaches. “I know where the fires are that I have to put out.”

The room -- call it Error-Traffic Control -- has hotlines to NFL observers sitting in every press box and to producers at CBS, ESPN, ABC and Fox who can feed information to the broadcast teams in case something needs to be clarified on the air. Pereira has no direct contact with the officiating crews working the games or anyone in the replay booths. Pereira refers to it as a “command center,” but acknowledges that’s something of a misnomer because no commands emanate from there; it’s more an observation deck.

The objective isn’t to change what’s happening, just to know right away what has happened. And that has real benefits. For example, in Tennessee’s opener at Miami there were controversial calls regarding an onside kick and a roughing-the-passer penalty. When his phone rang early the next morning and the Caller ID revealed it was Titan Coach Jeff Fisher, Pereira didn’t even bother to say hello. He simply picked up the receiver and asked, “What do you want to talk about first, the onside kick or the roughing the passer?”

Fisher’s response?

“Silence,” Pereira recalled with a smile. “He was blown away.”

There’s always room for improvement, Pereira says, even though he believes the NFL has the best officials of any sport. Every Monday through Wednesday of the season, supervisors and assistant supervisors, all former officials, meet in New York and meticulously grade the weekend of work. Each is assigned a game and reviews every play from the TV broadcast and from the coaches’ tapes, which are shot from the sideline and end-zone angles. Scrutinizing each game takes six to eight hours.

There are roughly 35,000 plays in a 17-week NFL season, and the league has determined its officials called 96.74% of them correctly last season -- and that includes accurately spotting the ball.

“People really think they show up on Sunday morning, officiate the game, then hop in their cars or get on planes and go home,” Pereira said of the officials, who are paid between $2,134 and $7,334 a game, depending on their assignment and experience. “They don’t appreciate the scrutiny, the preparation, the accountability that goes into it.”

Major League Baseball, the NBA and NHL also grade and supervise officials in varying degrees. Baseball has six former umpires who are supervisors and about a dozen “field observers” who attend about half of the games. The NBA has one person who works from a broadcast center, plus an official “observer” in each city who attends games and reviews them on video. The NHL has a manned control room in Toronto, and its officials are given laptop computers on which they receive and review video clips of controversial plays.

Pereira, who normally is easygoing and has a self-deprecating wit, is fiercely protective of the men he represents. While the Arizona-Atlanta game was on the big screen last Sunday, the color commentator said the referees at his son’s junior varsity game could spot the ball better.

“Aw, that’s a cheap shot,” Pereira said, still pacing. “He ought to get down on the field and see what he could do.”

But there’s little time to stew over wisecracks.

“Two flags in Vikings-Bears!”

“Ray Lewis just nailed Carson Palmer helmet to helmet!”

“Fight in Minnesota-Chicago!”

The observers stay zeroed in on their TVs, glancing away only during commercial breaks.

“You can’t get caught up in anyone else’s game,” said Randall Liu, who works in the NFL’s media relations department during the week. “If you turn away, you could miss something.”

Even though Manahan calls the place a fan’s nirvana, the monitors don’t while away the afternoon the way they might at home. They lean forward in their seats, headsets only on one ear so they can hear Pereira’s instructions, sharpened No. 2 pencils at the ready. They are paid $150 a game, but most probably would work free. Theirs is a task too intense for the casual fan, but it’s still a cherry job.

“There’s no better way to watch football than in this room,” said Samantha Rapoport, 23, who charts games when she isn’t processing contracts for the league’s player personnel department. “It’s high intensity. I compare it to being a quarterback.”

She should know. Rapoport used to be the starting quarterback for the Montreal Blitz of the Independent Women’s Football League. Her season ended abruptly in June when a 6-foot-6, 365-pound lineman for Boston’s Bay State Warriors jumped offside, ignored the whistle and flopped on her. Rapoport’s neck hasn’t been the same since.

Born and raised in Canada, Rapoport landed a coveted internship with the NFL partly because of her creativity. Along with her application, she sent a football with the message, “What other quarterback could accurately deliver a football 386 miles?” She eventually rolled the internship into a full-time job, a dream gig for a woman her father calls “Little Elway.”

Typical of a quarterback, Rapoport likes to be in control of situations. In Week 2, she noticed that Fox had the score of her game in the upper-right corner, but not the clock. She relayed that to someone in the room, who promptly informed the network. Moments later, the clock appeared.

“I felt like I had a direct impact on the game in some small way,” she said. “That’s very cool.”

Pereira has those moments all the time. It’s not uncommon for someone from a network to call the command center in search of an explanation for the broadcast crew. Last season, there were two flags after an interception, causing uncertainty and confusion in the Fox booth. Suddenly, Pereira’s cellphone rang. It was color man Cris Collinsworth, speaking at a whisper.

“What just happened?” Collinsworth asked.

Pereira gave a quick explanation, and, moments later, Collinsworth sorted through the mess for millions of viewers. Hey, he knew it all along.

“We made him look like a genius,” Pereira said.

It’s unclear exactly what types of things Pereira, Upson and their assistants will be able to do as technology becomes more advanced. One thing’s for sure: They don’t want to tamper with the job officials are doing on the field.

“We don’t want to be making decisions from a central location, nor do we want to be up in the press box making decisions,” Pereira said. “For me, having decisions made anywhere but on the field is going in the wrong direction.”

As it is, things are fast and furious enough in the room. Pereira keeps the atmosphere as light as possible by awarding points to the observers -- one point each for fastest game, first challenge, first touchdown, and so on -- with the winner getting a free dinner at the end of the season. Lunch is brought in from one of the best barbecue joints in Manhattan, but even that is slow to lure the observers out of their chairs.

“You have to watch for every little thing,” explained Sloane Giddon, a Cornell senior and NFL intern who flies from Ithaca to New York City for a chance to chart games. “There’s no multi-tasking. It’s even too hard to eat while you’re doing it.”

Most of Pereira’s helpers leave after working the first wave of games, and a skeleton crew sticks around to work those in the late afternoon. Fewer games mean less intensity, and Pereira occasionally even sits down.

Sometimes, his wife, Gail, joins him to watch the Sunday night game, usually leaving before her husband heads home about 3 a.m.

Gail said her husband has never been a sound sleeper, especially on nights after a football Sunday. Even though the command center makes him more effective, she said, it doesn’t necessarily help him rest at ease.

“He’s got more to worry about than he had when he was just seeing one game,” she said. “That can be a curse.”