‘A true, true Patriot’: Nancy Meier prepares for retirement after 52 seasons in Foxboro

On Sept. 11, 2001, New England Patriots Vice President of Player Personnel Scott Pioli started his morning in an anxious, impatient mood. Two days earlier, the team had opened the season with an unexpected loss at Cincinnati, and there was a lot of work to do to right the ship.

Pioli walked out of head coach Bill Belichick’s office, and for the second time that morning, he noticed that everybody else was watching TV. Annoyed, Pioli asked longtime scouting administration director Nancy Meier: “Why isn’t anybody working?”

Meier pulled him aside, quietly indicating she needed his full attention. “Scott, do you have any idea what’s going on?” she asked. “You may want to see this. Somebody just crashed a plane into the World Trade Center.”

Twenty-four years later, Pioli says he still owes Meier for that intervention, an example of her countless contributions to the culture and operations of the Patriots on their way to becoming a dynasty.

“She saved me from myself that day,” Pioli said. “She could tell I had no idea what was going on. She could tell I was aggravated. We were a hot mess, but this was something I needed to pay attention to. Because if I continued to be aggravated by people watching TV, I wasn’t going to be a very good leader that day.”

Meier, 70, is wrapping up her final season with the Patriots after a remarkable 51-year tenure. She’ll retire when her contract runs out in May, ending a run that started in 1974 when she took a part-time clerical role as a 19-year-old college student. As director of scouting administration, she’s been an indispensable organizer and facilitator of the scouting department for decades, a role that’s made her lifelong friends with a diverse, who’s who list of coaches, players, scouts, general managers and others.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m ready and not ready all at the same time,” Meier said of her impending retirement. “A lot of days, it hasn’t felt like work, and then some days it can feel a little overwhelming. But I just want to be sure that I’ve taken some time for myself and my family, to find things outside of Foxboro at 11 a.m. that I never know about.”

Thriving Through Change

Meier’s tenure has covered 11 head coaches, four owners and a long list of senior personnel executives. She started off doing her job with landline phones, carbon paper, typewriters and the U.S. Mail. Today she’s a master of the modern digital office toolkit.

In 1974, Patriots scouts hit the road with a film projector and a notepad. They’d write up scouting reports longhand, and mail them back to Massachusetts. Meier would type them up and file them in black binders.

“I got my first email [address] at the Patriots. I got my first cellphone here. I’m still trying to catch up on Excel. Younger people learned this in school,” Meier said.

Simply surviving all that change is an accomplishment worth celebrating. But insiders say she’s done much more than survived; she thrived through it all, a credit to her organization, joyful personality, people instincts and strong sense of self.

Belichick once called her “the ultimate team player.” Bill Parcells called her “a true, true Patriot” when he was inducted into the team’s hall of fame. Tom Brady called her “an unsung hero.”

“She was not a chameleon,” Pioli said. “She was never manipulative. She was all-in, all the time, and she understood hierarchy. She served, but she was not subservient. She added value to every type of leader you could imagine. That’s why she’s so rare. Sometimes when people stay somewhere for so long, you might think of them as a hanger-on, or someone who changes with the winds. She is anything but that.”

As the business of football became more professionalized and money poured into the NFL, Meier’s job evolved. Today, she coordinates the logistics for all free agent visits and signings, tryouts and potential draft pick visits. She handles travel arrangements for scouts, and helps players bring family members to games. She assists rookies with finding housing and opening bank accounts.

It can be high-stakes stuff. The paperwork formalizing every player transaction that goes to the league must be perfect and ASAP. That’s Meier’s job.

Current head coach Mike Vrabel met Meier as a prospective free agent, signing in 2001 during his playing career. Like many players who have come through New England, Meier was Vrabel’s first point of contact, because she makes travel arrangements and schedules their visits. She’s the first Patriot many players meet in person, often at an uncertain time in their lives.

“She cares about people and gets to know them on a personal level,” Vrabel said. “Whether it’s a player, or a coach is dealing with a personal situation, she coordinates and handles travel, and she almost acts like a team mom in that regard. I think there’s a lot of trust that’s been built up over that many years.”

Today, Vrabel considers her a friend but also sees her as a strategic leader; someone who runs a tight administrative ship but also can see where process improvements can be made.

“She’s got an amazing personality,” Vrabel said. “That’s always joy, and there’s always a willingness to help players and coaches, whatever it may be.”

Other than the Belichick era, Meier has seen frequent turnover in football leadership. In a 2022 interview with NFL Media, she said flexibility and an open mind are the keys to managing change. “We all think the way we do things is the best way, but I’ve really seen how you can do it better, but you have got to be willing to change and can’t be stubborn,” she said. In a recent interview, she gave more credit to the series of coaches and personnel leaders for recognizing her contributions.

“I feel like I was always highly respected on my own, and they were such great, humble people and I think they recognized good work, and that I understood the business and could carry myself well enough,” she said.

Aside from the technology, the biggest change in Meier’s time has been the overall maturation of sports as a business. Coaches used to work regular business hours; today they’re in the office seven days a week. Players used to be unpolished gym rats who showed up in July and disappeared in January, sometimes to part-time jobs. Today, even the rookies are savvy, worldly operators who understand their obligation to the public and their teams, and carry themselves as professionals.

“Teams in general have so much more to offer, and it’s a much bigger business and there’s so much more to gain, from ownership on down, by making sure your program represents what an owner like Mr. Kraft would want it to look like,” Meier said.

‘This is home for me’

A Massachusetts native, Meier has lived about 30 minutes by car from the Patriots’ headquarters for her entire career. A couple of times, a coach or personnel executive took a job at a different franchise and Meier briefly considered joining him. But she “never got farther than about 75% serious.” “This is home for me. My entire family is here. We are New England, Boston-based people, and going off somewhere by myself wasn’t anything I found especially appealing. So here I am.”

Twice, it did seem like the Patriots might move without her: First, when former owner Jim Orthwein made it clear he wanted to relocate the team to St. Louis in 1993, and then in 1999, when Kraft seriously considered building a stadium in Hartford. But those never happened, and at some point next May, after one more draft, Meier will leave Patriot Place on her own terms.

In retirement, her two children and four grandchildren await, along with something she hasn’t had in a half-century: a free August.

“The first thing we’re doing is a family cruise,” she said. “I’ve never really had the opportunity to do something like that. So we’re going to do a cruise and then it’s a good time of year to ease into summer, because the weather gets so nice up here in June and July, and I do love the summer.”

But she may not be completely done in football.

“Then, once football season rolls around, who knows, I maybe will pick up something,” Meier said. “I know a lot of people in a lot of places; maybe somebody will want a little help with something, so it may not be totally the end of the road.”