Arkansas’ new GM Remy Cofield introduced, talks role with Razorbacks

FAYETTEVILLE — Remy Cofield, the deputy AD and general manager for Arkansas athletics met with the media on Thursday afternoon to go over many of the details of his job.

Cofield was hired in early March away from the Boston Celtics of the NBA. Cofield admitted on Thursday his time at Arkansas has been a busy one. When asked about the lay of the land concerning his job, he had an interesting reply.

“The lay of the land I think is a little much,” Cofield said. “I’m trying these last two months to just kind of get my feet wet. I was telling Kyle (Parkinson) this is the second time I’ve been down here you know, seeing the area and I didn’t really know where the media room was so, that’s the biggest thing for me. But coming down to Arkansas, it’s been fantastic ever since I stepped foot down here. People have been really nice. There’s a lot of different places to explore. My family is happy with it, they enjoy being here. So we’re just happy to start and get going.”

Right now revenue sharing is a big topic in college athletics and Cofield was asked if it will make things more equitable?

“I think we have to just find the right players,” Cofield said. “I think overall when you’re competing with money, the money is the money. I think at end of the day we’ve got to get the right people for Arkansas. I think that’s the biggest thing, and our fanbase wants us to be extremely competitive. I’m extremely competitive, all of our coaches are extremely competitive. We’re going to get the right players for Arkansas, that’s the most important for us. We’ll compete with some of the money issues that are going to be out there. I think a lot of the cap stuff that we’re going to see going forward is going to level it out a little more so that we can compete from a money standpoint. But I think it starts with the players, we’ve got to get the right players for us.”

While Cofield is expected to eventually have a staff that isn’t something that has happened yet.

“Well, I don’t have a staff in place, and I think we’ll go over that when the time is right,” Cofield said. “I do think we’ve gone back and forth about a few positions that will help us in the long run. But I’ve talked to a few people, I’ll be honest about that. We talked to a few people about different things, and I think it’s about getting the right people in to help us out and be a part of this, because it’s important we get it right the first time. We’ll get the right people in, and when the time is right to disclose all of that, we’ll let you guys know.”

Being from Boston and Philadelphia fitting in at Arkansas wasn’t something Cofield thought might be the case at first. But he explained why it now feels like a great fit in Fayetteville.

“You know, initially I didn’t think I would be,”Cofield said. “I thought initially coming from the pros, getting into the college landscape, this climate of things was a bit different for me. Working in the pros with the Celtics for the last 12 years, that’s all I know. So I think coming down here and being a part of this, as soon as I got down here and started talking to people, it made it abundantly clear that it was a challenge that I wanted to take on, it was a challenge that I wanted to be a part of. The people that I’ve been introduced to since I’ve been down here, the people that are in this office that work hard every single day, that have held my hand a lot through this whole last two months here, it made it really easy to kind of be a part of this and say I made the right decision.”

Coming from an NBA team to college sports Cofield talked about what he brings from his time with Celtics.

“I’m very collaborative,” Cofield said. “I work with a lot of different people. I’m able to kind of be a chameleon in some ways. I also think that this position, this role, leans more so into strategy. I think being able to kind of look at a cap, not just in the present year but two years, three years from now, giving my opinions to coaching staffs of how they could go about going around the cap and figuring out ways to get players that they want in, I think that’s important. And then of course we have great staffs that do a lot of the recruiting, they have scouts on their staff, they have personnel staffs. We have some of the best in the country across the board. So we’re going to lean on them a lot to do a lot of the heavy lifting there, and we’ll continue to give them advice on how we could put rosters together in a way that’s very beneficial to (I think he meant “not”) only the athlete, as well as the university.”

The Arkansas legislature recently passed a law exempting taxes from NIL earnings. Cofield was asked if that has helped?

“I think it has in some of our discussions with some of our athletes that we’d like to get in,” Cofield said. “I think they understand that they go somewhere else and more money is being taken out of the pocket, that’s not what they want to do and so it’s helped us. I would assume it’s helped us a little bit, just closing the gap on some of those potential deals out there. But we have more to offer than just the non-state taxes. We’re the university of Arkansas and we should see ourselves that way.”

While some schools have outlined percentages how the money will be distributed from the revenue sharing. Cofield isn’t ready to determine that yet.

“We can’t talk about percentages and how we allocate those funds currently,” Cofield said. “But I do know that we will be making sure all of our sports teams have a way to compete at a high level. We want to make sure that the teams that are participating in our rev share at a high level that they have what they need as well. Even our other teams that are not participating in rev share, we want to do everything we possibly can to make sure they’re part of a structure that helps them get the players they want and that the need to be on a competitive level. We’re working through all that. There’s no easy explanation for all this stuff. We’re just trying to figure out the best course of action for our team, our university.”