Q&A: NMSU AD Joe Fields on setting the 'foundation' for Aggies success

To Joe Fields, it’s like building a house.

You set the foundation. Put up the two-by-fours.

“And then we can just operate the athletic department,” he told the Journal last week.

Through the first four months of his tenure as New Mexico State’s athletic director, Fields has been focused on just that: setting the foundation for the future. In the short-term, that process has taken the form of staff changes and restructuring within the athletic department.

Here is the Journal’s Q&A with Fields about his vision and more:

Questions and responses have been edited for clarity.

You’re nearly four months into your tenure at NMSU. What has this period been like for you?

Couple pieces — there’s been a lot of learning and meeting and greeting. You shake a lot of hands, take a lot of pictures. I’ve tried to be really intentional visiting with people, getting to know our stakeholders, connecting with our coaches, our student-athletes and things of that nature.

Once you do that, you realize, like, hey, (here’s) how you can really move the needle. Maybe a month ago, I kind of started to put some things in place with the staff and the structure of what I think is going to be really important to allow us to operate at a high level moving forward.

I would say it’s been a combination, really, of just kind of meeting and greeting our stakeholders and truly kind of putting the foundation down right now for us to be successful in the future.

How would you describe the foundation you want NMSU to build?

I look at it like a house, right? To build a really good, strong house, you got to put a foundation down, you got to put the two-by-fours up, and then you kind of build it. I think our foundation is about having the right people in the right seats, the (right) structure and prioritizing the right things.

Do we have the right people in the right areas as leaders and what are we prioritizing? We got to prioritize our budget. We got to prioritize (revenue share). Certainly our revenue-generation arm.

It’s just really laying that foundation of people, structure and making sure our priorities are on point internally with what we need to do to be successful and to be able to help us navigate this new collegiate landscape.

You’ve been around college athletics for a long time. Did you always want to be an athletic director?

I got into it thinking I was going to want to be a coach, a head coach. When I was making that decision to coach, there wasn’t a coaching opportunity available at Syracuse when I went back — they had a (teaching assistant) job open and they put me there until a coaching job opened.

I stumbled into administration and kind of fell in love with it. I was really fortunate at Syracuse that, when I transitioned over to academics and administration, the athletic director there at the time was Daryl Gross. He was just an incredible mentor and I really saw myself trying to navigate the ranks from that.

I really felt like, ‘O.K., I could do this, here’s the next step, here’s how I’m going to navigate it.’ And he provided me a lot of guidance. So I would say I initially wanted to be a head coach, but quickly transitioned over to wanting to become an athletic director, and I had a great mentor.

What made NMSU the right job for you?

Opportunity. I think when you look at opportunities, you look at jobs, you want to be able to truly impact the place. Once I did a deep dive and looked at some of the things that I thought was really necessary to be successful here, I thought that one, we would have the opportunity to accomplish those things, and two, I thought that my skill set and some of the things that I navigated in my career up until this point really transitioned well.

Then you start looking at the president (NMSU President Valerio Ferme), you start looking at some of those other pieces you know are really important to be successful, it made a lot of sense.

(Ferme) was very early in his tenure and I thought that was important to create some alignment and longevity. I knew that he has an appetite to do things the right way and support athletics, which goes back to that first piece of the opportunity (of) really being able to get some things done here.

The short-term and long-term visions for an athletic department go hand-in-hand. What are the steps you’ve taken over these first four months to implement both those plans, and how do you see both taking shape over the next year?

Really quickly, I tried to cast the vision. I really just tried to get people to truly understand how we were going to operate, the standards and just long-term, kind of who we are: I want to graduate student-athletes. I want to win championships. I want to operate a first-class organization.

I put that out there in all of my conversations every time I meet with folks to just put a pin in that — like, hey, here’s our north star. Here’s what we’re trying to get accomplished. And then you go back and you look at the athletics department and you (ask), are we equipped? Are we set up to do those things at a high level?

Now I’m in the process of laying the foundation of allowing us to execute that vision. It goes back to the short-term goal (of) getting the right people in the building, getting the organization structured properly, prioritizing the right things and what we need to do to be able to accomplish those goals.

I’ve told our staff, hey, we’re going to go really, really hard this spring semester. We’re going to work hard, we’re going to do a lot of things to lay a foundation so that once we lay our foundation, then we can just operate the athletic department.

Now, we got the policies and procedures. We got the standards. We know what we need to be discussing, and we know who’s handling the situation. You really got to get your infrastructure right, and that’s what we’re concentrating on right now.

I adjusted the sport administration program. Prior to a couple months ago, we only had like three sports administrators handling all sports. Now we have eight sports administrators handling all sports, and that allows us to really provide the proper attention to all of our programs. Now we meet as a sport administrator group weekly and talk through how we want to handle our programs. How do we solve issues for our coaches? How do we administrate at a high level and allow the coaches to coach at a high level?

You’ve made some staff changes within the athletic department, shuffling some employees to different roles, parting ways with others (Amber Burdge, Braun Cartwright and James Hall) and bringing in entirely new staffers — deputy AD for internal operations Molly Tye, chief financial officer Eric Crawford and senior associate AD for Josh Hadley — to replace them. What fueled the decision to bring in those people in particular?

It comes from evaluation. Where we need to go as an athletic department … I realized like, hey, we’re not going to be able to get there currently in kind of the status quo. So, no disrespect to those individuals that are no longer with us — they were great and did a lot of great things. At the time in which they served in those roles, they were the right people for those roles.

But if you look at where we’re trying to go, and me having familiarity with Molly and Josh and knowing their skill sets and how they work and kind of how they operate, and them knowing how I operate, it made a lot of sense to bring them on board.

I didn’t work with Eric previously, but when you talk about how we’re running a business now, we need a real CFO that's concentrating on our business and our finances, helping us with (revenue share) and contracts. We needed to get someone in the building that was going to eat, sleep, drink and all they do is really think about the business of what we’re doing.

So those (three) are individuals we that one, very fortunate to get, and two, I had some familiarity with. And then three, they just really help us get closer to what we need to do to operate at a high level, because of their experiences and their skill sets.

What is your vision for revenue share?

First and foremost, we got to be really efficient, meaning we have to understand it. There’s NIL, there’s rev share — what’s NIL and what’s rev share? So we get to be really educated on what’s happening in the space. And then we have to be able to execute the plan.

I would love for each one of our teams to have a cap (in) rev share. A sport administrator who handles kind of the day-to-day of our athletic department (and) they kind of serve as a quasi-general manager. 

Then, once we agree to terms with (a student-athlete), how efficient are we with the contracts? How tight are our contracts? How do we pay them? You know, if they decide to move on, how do we cut that off? And so it’s all the logistics stuff that we got to be really good at, the educational aspect of it. Then just how do we organize ourselves and work with our coaches to be really efficient and really proactive in this space?

The number one thing when you talk rev share, it’s the money, right? How much money can I give them in their caps? Because that’s the name of the game right now. We got to be organized. Again, I got to be really proactive regarding being able to generate revenue to get the appropriate cap numbers to operate at a high level, to operate at a championship level.

We always talk about football leading the way in college athletics, especially when it comes to conference realignment. What are your long-term expectations for the football program?

It goes back to what I said across the athletic department: I think our vision is to graduate student-athletes, win championships and operate a first-class organization. And so the expectation is that we win, we win championships moving forward.

If I say win championships, I got to make sure that that program has championship resources. The resources need to match the expectation. And for all of our programs, we have to figure out what’s that championship recipe. Is it more scholarships? Is it rev share? Is it better nutrition? Is it better travel?

We got to figure out all those ingredients to build championship programs. Football, it leads the charge, so we need to have a healthy, successful football program. If we’re able to accomplish that, we’re going to have a great athletic department, we’re going to have a healthy athletic department.

That’s the same thing on a conference level. The conference (Conference USA) is really good from a football standpoint. It’s going to get more opportunities. It is no secret we need football to go, we need football to operate at a high level.

If football is operating at a high level, everybody benefits.

Of course, basketball holds the key to many NMSU fans’ hearts. In a similar vein, what are your long-term expectations for the basketball program?

Very similar to what we talked about with (football). We want to win championships across the board. I want New Mexico State to be a football program, a basketball program, a swim program, a golf program. We want to have holistic success across our athletic department.

I am not naive to the point that we really, really, really, really care about basketball here. And very similar to football, we want to make sure that we’re providing them with championship resources.

It’s no secret that we haven’t found our rhythm yet. (Men's basketball head coach Jason Hooten) and I are having conversations regarding what it looks like to find that rhythm. But we want to win at a high level, and we should. We have an opportunity to do that, and that’s going to remain the expectation.

Right now, we just gotta continue to take it one game at a time, and I got to make sure that, as an administration, we're supporting that program and providing great leadership, resources and really supporting coach Hooten to get that thing rolling.

But we want to be good in football. We want to be good in basketball. We want to be good across the board in all of our sports. And we’re not going to shy away from that — we’re going to own that. But we got to also do the work to make that come to fruition.

Sean Reider covers college football and other sports for the Journal. You can reach him at sreider@abqjournal.com or via X at @lenaweereider.