On Wednesday, as college football prospects nationwide formally celebrate the culmination of an arduous recruiting process, coaches who have put a tremendous amount of blood and sweat into the whole undertaking won't have much time to enjoy the party.

"We'll be by the fax machine, and we'll call each kid to let him know that his [national letter of intent] came through," Stanford's Lance Anderson says. "But in between faxes coming in, we'll be watching 2016 prospects. We've been on the road so much lately, and this is our chance to catch up."

Welcome to modern-day college football recruiting: The process that never sleeps, not even after Anderson has completed a grueling San Diego-Arizona-Utah-Atlanta marathon to cap off an entire year of similar treks around the country.

As the spectacle of national signing day grows, Anderson -- Stanford's defensive coordinator and recruiting guru -- has nary a second to catch his breath. And while he may be in a similar boat as hundreds of other coaches nationwide, it's important to emphasize he's not operating the same one. That's because the Cardinal vessel that works to navigate the treacherous recruiting waters is equipped with more complex steering controls than its counterparts.

Because of the university's stringent academic admissions requirements (last year, Stanford's acceptance rate -- 5 percent -- was the lowest in the country, beneath even Harvard's), Anderson's job stretches well beyond the realm of evaluating potential prospects and convincing them to play for the Cardinal.

"Here, that's only half the battle," he said.

The other half is one that sees either the elation of acceptance or the devastation of rejection -- and nothing in between. Anderson works as the Stanford football program's liaison to the university's admissions office. He must gauge the pulse of the school's rigorous standards and apply that evaluation to each of the program's high school prospects. It's Anderson's job to track how well Stanford's recruits are tackling the school's rigorous requirements -- good grades in multiple Advanced Placement (AP) classes, a high SAT score, five essays and up to three recommendation letters.

"We're asking [our recruits] to do things that no other school is asking them to do," he says.

Anderson says the reward at the end of the tunnel -- admission into the university -- makes Stanford's unique recruiting challenge worth the added grind.

"You realize that the kid has done something that could put him in position to change and improve the rest of his life," he says. "And you know how much work went into it."

But failure inevitably rears its head multiple times a year, and it presents a frustrating flip side to the process. Many recruits wait until they've been admitted to the university to make a verbal pledge to the football program, but some don't. The admissions office rejects Stanford recruits on an annual basis, forcing these players to cut ties with their top choice and reopen their recruitment, often with little time remaining before signing day. This can happen to a player who has been committed to Stanford "for a long time," Anderson said.

"When that happens, it's crushing," he said. "You feel so much for the kid. It feels like they're part of the team already, that they're already one of your kids. It makes you question yourself: Do you really want to keep going through this?"

Ultimately, though, Anderson says there's almost always a tangible reason why a prospect is denied by Stanford's admissions office -- "They usually fell short in one area or another," he said -- and that knowledge has allowed the Cardinal staff to tailor and improve the efficiency of its recruiting approach.

Anderson arrived on the Farm with coach Jim Harbaugh in 2007. At the time, the Cardinal were coming off a 1-11 season, so the football program struggled to generate national pull while Anderson was new to the process of identifying prospects who might fit the necessary academic and football bills. Stanford cast an extremely broad net to compensate for these deficiencies. Anderson says the program offered more than 300 scholarships annually in the early Harbaugh era, a number that has decreased to less than 100 now.

"I've worked with the same people in the admissions office since I've been here," he said. "I have a good feel for the kind of kid that will make it here now."

Before the Cardinal went to four consecutive BCS bowls between 2010-13, it wasn't easy to find enough interested high-potential prospects who were also willing to put in the early academic work to gain acceptance.

"Back in 2007, people knew Stanford was a good academic school but the football program didn't carry much weight," Anderson said. "Now, it's a lot easier to get interest from kids all over the country. We don't have to throw out as many offers now. If a player fits our system, we feel that we have a pretty good chance at him, and it's not as difficult to get kids to do the [academic] requirements."

Andrew Luck and Richard Sherman are two of the brightest young stars in professional football, and witnessing the success of Stanford alumni in the NFL has further entrenched the Cardinal as a household name in the living rooms of talented high school players across the country. At the very least, it has further helped Stanford attract its type of prospects -- even those on the East Coast who might have been skeptical of the university's distance from home -- to campus for a visit.

And that's when the Cardinal have a chance to showcase their university's overall product.

"Stanford is about more than sitting in a library," Anderson said. "There's a lot going on here and in the Bay Area. We show [the prospects] the [driverless] cars. We take them to the EA Sports headquarters [in nearby Redwood City]. We show them a class that's building a jet engine. The kids are blown away by all the virtual reality stuff. They really seem to love it."

In this way, the Cardinal seem to have found a way to take stringent admissions requirements -- long considered a recruiting disadvantage -- and turn the university's academic prowess behind them into a selling point for the football program.

"Academics do limit our pool, but there are enough kids out there," Anderson explains. "When they understand what this place is about, it's really attractive to them. We have to show them, 'This is what Stanford can offer.' It opens up a world of opportunities for them."

That, in turn, has opened up a world of opportunities for the Cardinal's coaches, who will continue to sift through them even on signing day. The recruiting process never sleeps -- it only evolves.