When it comes to the Patriots, no one has worked for the organization longer than Nancy Meier.
This is year 47 for the director of scouting administration and she has her hands in all aspects of the organization.
In the offseason when the scouting and coaching staff is traveling the country to look at prospects, Meier is booking their travel. Or players coming in for visits, both in the offseason and during the season, that's on her, too. Who is usually one of the first people new players meet inside the building? Meier.
When the combine is held like normal in Indianapolis and the team has an interview room set up, Meier is the one organizing that, which can get challenging, on top of hundreds of other duties to make the week go smoothly. Virtually every day during the season there's some sort of transaction that needs to go through the league -- yup, Meier again.
Meier took a photo on the field this week with the rest of the scouting staff, which prompted a question to Bill Belichick Thursday morning about what she means to the organization.
Belichick went in-depth, but a good summary was when he said, "Her job description is probably 50 pages long."
Here's his full response: "Nancy's one of those unique individuals that kind of makes everything work. She interacts with virtually everybody - scouts, coaches, players and other support staff. She puts a lot of things together, and her job description of what she actually does is probably 50 pages long, and there are so many little things that wouldn't even make that list, but they would come up from day to day, or maybe not even day to day, it might be once a year that she handles because of her experience and thoroughness and preparation. It really would be impossible for me to go through with her a whole list of things, and that changes from the regular season to the draft to the offseason program to if we're on an extended away trip and things like that, so it's a very lengthy and comprehensive set of things that she handles and that includes not only the players and staff and so forth, but also families and things that are related to those individuals as well, and that would also extend into some logistics and travel and so forth.
"She's great to work with. She's got a great attitude, a great temperament. She deals with all the people and all the personalities, thousands of them, coaches, players and other people through the course of her career. I think everyone probably has kind of the same feeling for her, which is pretty remarkable that she could have that type of positive relationship with so many people on so many different levels. I extend all that to multiple family members and so forth that are involved in game day things and travel and tickets and relocation and so forth and so on. She never forgets a name. Doesn't forget a face. Knows how everybody's connected to everybody else. It's very remarkable.
"She's very unique, and like I said, a very comprehensive group of things she does, but then on the real football side of it, a lot of transactions and things that go on with the league, which on the player personnel end can be complex, have to be timely, have to done at certain times or by certain times or all those kind of things. She doesn't make the final decisions obviously. She has to manage all the transactions, league communication, player communication, the medical, like all the things that have to happen in the acquisition or release of a player, especially at the nature of cut down dates and things like that, or post draft when free agent signing days and those type of things, the wheel can get spinning pretty fast, but amazingly she can stay on it or slow it down however you want to look at it, so yeah. Thanks for the question, that's great. She's a very important person to any organization."
