The Atlantic has a great article about Fishman, known as Fish, who directs live football games on the fly. This stuff isn't planned out beforehand— it takes both an eye for cinematography and pace as well as an extraordinary understanding of the game itself, and Fish does almost every major sport. He has to know, for example, that a certain college basketball team relies on a full-court press for steals, and that the camera is going to have to follow the play immediately after a basket is scored instead of cutting away to the coach or the crowd.
It's pretty amazing stuff, a job very few people could even pretend to handle. [The Atlantic,image by Mark Peterson, Redux]