FAYETTEVILLE -- In a still developing story the University of Arkansas is hiring Remy Cofield away from the Boston Celtics to be the general manager.
Cofield was the Director of Scouting for the Celtics prior to taking the job at Arkansas. Sam Pittman recently talked about what the Razorbacks were looking for in a general manager.
"Well, I want somebody that's done it," Pittman said. "So you may have to go to the NFL, NBA, whatever, to find somebody like that. You want someone who's kind of done that before, whether it be the top dog or the second, you know, somebody that understands that. Because that's something that I've never dealt with. Well, I have for three years, and I want some help. But you'd want a guy to be able- You would want a recruiter. If somebody comes in and says, 'Well, I need 500,000,' you don't want to just- Hell, any of us can say, 'Oh, okay.’
“I mean, we need a negotiator. To be honest with you, I need someone that takes the, ‘Well, Coach Pittman won't give it to me. Coach Pittman won't give it to me.’ I need that taken off my plate. I need somebody to be ahead of what the market is. And I think the market is going to change again because of revenue sharing and your collective. It’s not gonna be, ‘Hey, we can pay you $1 million out of the collective.’ No, we can't. We can pay you the max out of what you're worth. And a committee is gonna say it's worth $5,000. You know, it's going to change. So, we need somebody up on the rules, we need somebody that's a good talker, a good recruiter. We need a guy that's a good evaluator, because we obviously have corners, and we'll go, ‘OK, this is 1, this is 2, this is 3, this is 4.’ And you don't go, ‘This is one can get one.’ No, I don't want the ones we can, I want, ‘This is the No. 1 guy we think we that we're talking to…No. 2, No. 3.’ I don't care. We'll figure out if we can get them or not. There's different boards now. One of them, you'll have a group of coaches that put up the ones they can get. That's number one. Well, hell no, I watched the tape, too. He ain’t No. 1, he’s No. 7. You know, let's go after the No. 1 guy. That's another voice in the room, and he's not in there every single meeting, and he's going to be an organizer of the portal, organizer of the high school recruiting, organizer of junior college recruiting, and so there's a lot that he or she will be able to help us with. But that's what I'm looking for. And I'm looking for someone to talk to these kids’ agents, besides me. I want somebody else to talk to them and then give me the information.”
CBS' Jon Rothstein was the first to report Arkansas' hiring of Cofield. Cofield became Boston’s Director of Scouting in 2022. But he’s climbed the front office ranks in the NBA since 2012 when he started with the Celtics as a Corporate Sales Executive.
In 2013, he became a basketball operations assistant in Boston and six years later, he became a college scout for the Celtics and the general manager of the Maine Red Claws (now known as the Maine Celtics) of the NBA G League.
