Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione remembers reporters camping outside his house. He remembers the late-night phone calls and the cars that followed him down the street. And he recalls the man that jumped out from behind the garbage can at Will Rogers Airport.

And this was just in his seventh month on the job. But you're the man repsonsible for finding a coach to restore a school's rich football tradition, such bizarre tactics are the norm.

	Oklahoma chose wisely in naming Bob Stoops as its head coach two years ago.

"Everyone wanted to know and they wanted to know right now," said Castiglione, who was hired at Oklahoma in April, 1998 after 18 years at Missouri. "That's the pressure we were working under. It almost became a challenge to become more creative than the members of the media."

In retrospect, it's easy to say Castiglione made a great decision that year hiring Florida defensive coordinator Bob Stoops, who has the No. 1 Sooners on the verge of the national championship game. Because of that decision, he can sit back and watch this fall as many of his colleagues play the game of college coaching free agency.

It's a game where timing is everything. Can you get the man you want, when you want before high school recruits start looking elsewhere?

"That, my friend, is the 64 million dollar question -- and quite the difficult one at that," said Oklahoma State athletics director Terry Don Phillips, who recently fired Bob Simmons. "With recruiting and the kids already on campus, you work on a real time constraint."

The challenge is a tad more difficult this year, with 15 schools undergoing a coaching change and a few more sure to follow. Included in the list is a host of prestigious jobs at Alabama, Arizona, Arizona St., BYU, North Carolina and USC.

"You look at Alabama, and they are fighting for their life right now to find somebody," said LSU athletics director Joe Dean, a relative expert in the field, having hired three football coaches in his 14 years at the school. "A real key is emotional involvement and right now, most of the people with ties to Alabama are unavailable right now. It's bad timing."

The situation was similar in 1998, when Castiglione targeted Stoops as his No. 1 choice and chased him down in a year that Auburn, Clemson, Washington and Colorado were among 20 schools searching for replacements.

The speed of Castiglione's decision -- he hired Stoops eight days after John Blake was fired -- was key in the landing of junior college quarterback Josh Heupel, the focal point of this year's top-ranked team. The Sooners' quick, efficient search is about as smooth and mistake-free as they come, an athletic director's dream.

"Nobody wants to move hastily with such an important decision, but the timing is critical -- absolutely critical," Castiglione said. "The candidates you regard as best fits, let's face it, some of them aren't going to wait around. Those that do wait have a situation where they are probably happy where they are."

Timing is the reason North Carolina already had permission to interview Western Michigan's Gary Darnell just a couple hours after Virginia Tech's Frank Beamer turned down their coaching offer. It's the reason two schools, Maryland and West Virginia, have finished their search and settled on candidates just a few days after the end of the regular season.

And it's the reason that many coaches leave their old teams before a bowl game to get a head start on recruiting.

"If these athletics directors don't make their decisions by the first week of December, recruiting is all but dead in the water," said ESPN.com recruiting analyst Tom Lemming. "If it goes into late December, they are completely finished."

Already, 15 of the nation's 115 Division I-A football coaches have resigned, retired or been fired. Last year, that number was 12, the year before 20. Two of the 21 teams involved in a coaching change in 1997, Alabama and Maryland, are back at it again this time around.

The competition is so heated that many schools have hired outside consulting firms to aid in the search process. Dean did so last year when bringing Nick Saban to LSU, as did Texas Tech when hiring Oklahoma offensive coordinator Mike Leach. Phillips is working with such a group this time around.

"There are outstanding coaches all across the country, some you don't even know about until the end of your search, when you are down the highway pretty far with other candidates," Phillips said. "These consultants know where the candidates are, determine their interest and help you from that point of view."

To get a head start on the process, Phillips, as well as the athletics directors at Alabama and Arizona State, fired their coach before the season ended. The move has created an awkward situation at ASU, where Bruce Snyder, the 1998 National Coach of the Year, will coach the Sun Devils' in a bowl game in Hawaii next month despite being fired Nov. 15.

"As a former coach, I can tell you that the reason we did what we did while the season was underway is that we wanted our coaches to be able to look toward the future and understand what was going to happen," Phillips said. "The worst thing you can do to a coach is put him in a precarious position where there are all these rumors and he doesn't know what's going to happen."

Castiglione, though he urges that each situation is uniquely different, doesn't agree with such actions.

"I have yet to see where a decision like that has positively effected the outcome of a search," Castiglione said. "You have to believe there are underlying factors we don't know about, but if it's simply because the guy isn't winning enough games, why not let him have the dignity of finishing the season?"

This year is unique in that not only are there high-profile openings, but some of those openings are considering coaches that are already high profile where they are. It could produce a domino effect and is part of the reason that schools like Oklahoma, Clemson, Virginia Tech and Auburn have had big public resigning parties for their talented young coaches.

In just the past few days, coaches including Miami's Butch Davis and Purdue's Joe Tiller have put out press releases, explaining their intentions to stay at their current jobs. In addition to sending messages to recruits, these releases essentially tell athletics directors to look elsewhere.

	“	Nobody wants to move hastily with such an important decision, but the timing is critical -- absolutely critical. The candidates you regard as best fits, let's face it, some of them aren't going to wait around. Those that do wait have a situation where they are probably happy where they are. ”
		— Oklahoma AD Joe Castiglione

So under all these circumstances, with the often unbearable weight of intense media pressure, what makes the perfect search? How can an athletics director make the right decision and keep from starting over every four years?

For one, it's important that an AD quietly has his "short list" put together well before a final decision is made on the current coach. To help expedite the search process, many universities are scrapping the old "search committee" process, in which the athletics director, school president and a few other officials are all involved in interviews.

Instead, many school presidents are allowing for ADs to conduct the search on their own. Such was the case when Castiglione tracked down Stoops.

"I basically moved about the country as a one person search committee," Castiglione said. "We didn't want to impede the process with unruly sized committee and I guaranteed that helped our search immensely. It's the best way to go."

Though time is a factor, the key is identifying a candidate who is not only talented with the X's and O's, but carries the necessary personality intangibles as well.

At BYU, for example, where second-year athletics director Van Hale has the task of replacing 28-year coach LaVell Edwards, any candidate must be a Mormon -- even if it means sacrificing time. Chicago Bears offensive coordinator Gary Crowton, who grew up in Utah, is the leading candidate for the job.

"Our first priority is to get the right coach, hopefully someone who will stay here just as long as LaVell," said Hale, who quietly began his search last January. "It's more important to us to make the right choice in the long term than to sign a couple kids who may make an impact here for a year or two."

At Oklahoma, Castiglione was sold that Stoops had the personality traits necessary for rebuilding Oklahoma's downtrodden program. Castiglione researched all the way back to Stoops' high school days in Youngstown, Ohio before making his final decision.

"I guess you can over-analyze things sometimes, but I felt it was important to hire someone who was as strong in character as he was his ability to identify a recruit and teach student athletes," Castiglione said. "He had so many characteristics that I felt he was undeniably the right person to build our program."

Two years later, a low-pressure offseason proves Castiglione was right. Hale can only hope for similar fortunes.

"It's sort of like baseball free agency," he said. "With the arms race to find the right guy, the salary escalation -- it all trickles down to effect everyone else."

Wayne Drehs is a staff writer at ESPN.com.