FAYETTEVILLE -- Who is Remy Cofield?
The new general manager for the University of Arkansas athletic department and started April 1, after spending 12 years with the Boston Celtics as an NBA executive.
As the scouting director for the 2024 NBA champions, Cofield said he visited Fayetteville to watch the Arkansas men's basketball team's pro days when Eric Musselman coached the Razorbacks from 2019-2024.
"The 10-minute drive from the airport is like cows and chickens and things like that," Cofield joked with reporters during an introductory news conference at Reynolds Razorback Stadium on Thursday.
But as a self-declared city kid, he said he was unsure of his northeast-to-southwest diagonal expedition to settle here.
"Initially, I didn't think I would be," Cofield said of fitting in at Arkansas. "I thought initially, coming from the pros, getting into the college landscape, this climate of things was a bit different for me. ... It's 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, really easy to kind of be a part of this and say I made the right decision."
Arkansas Athletic Director Hunter Yurachek told reporters in May that Aug. 1 was the target date for Cofield to build out first part of his staff. The positions included people managing Arkansas football's roster, general player relations and general analytics. SEC football media days are next on the docket starting on July 14 at Atlanta.
Football will likely get the biggest chunk of the $20.5 revenue share from the House v. NCAA settlement, but Cofield declined Thursday to tell percentages of allocated funds per sport.
Cofield did say he does not have any staff members yet and that he and Yurachek are still deciding the route they want to take with said football-specific candidate. The background needed could range from the pros, like himself, college, or even someone fresher out of school "that just puts in the time." He also said he believes that there are strong talent evaluators at each level and "if anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears."
Cofield didn't pencil in his role for scouting or player evaluations, rather that it would be assisting in areas that need it -- essentially being the conduit for Arkansas coaches and their rosters or pertinent legislative rules.
"I'm very collaborative," Cofield said of his skills learned with the Celtics that will translate to UA. "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."
Cofield played college basketball at Penn for two seasons from 2007-2009, but he said he always wanted to be an agent. He interned with the Celtics and joined the front office in 2013. There, he witnessed an agent's busy life: long nights, numerous clients and travel.
He was raised in Boston, went to school in Philadelphia and returned to Boston for the past 14 years. The team-oriented line of work was more appealing.
"I worked for Danny Ainge and Brad Stevens, two of the best leaders that I've ever seen," Cofield said. "Those guys are extremely humble. They work hard. They're open. They take ideas from some of the oddest places out there. They're not afraid to make mistakes. I think it was easy when talking to Hunter over and over again that I could see a lot of that in him.
"We're going in a direction that college sports has never seen before and (Yurachek- hasn't been afraid to kind of jump into the deep end and kind of try new things."
Stevens, the Celtics' president of basketball operations, said, "We really missed Remy tonight," according to The Athletic's Jared Weiss from Wednesday's first round of the NBA Draft in Brooklyn, N.Y.
But now Cofield said he is Arkansas to stay.
"I came down here with my wife," he said. "I tried to tell her, 'Have an open mind. We'll figure this thing out.' But I think both of us when we got down here, we started going out, we started meeting the people. There's a sense of you just don't want to leave.
"I think there's a lot of people that live here that are coming from other places. I'm talking about like (Los Angeles), Chicago, Philadelphia, all these different places, bigger cities. They come down here and they don't want to leave. I think that's a testament to what Arkansas is."
Matt Byrne is the Bob Holt Razorback Reporter, named in honor of the longtime reporter who covered University of Arkansas sports. This position is funded by the ADG Community Journalism Project.