I’m in the “not sold on Patenaude” crowd. My issue isn’t that we were bad on offense- I expected a drop off - but that we were just plan inept. There were the occasional good days, but mostly it was a succession of 3-and-outs. I believe that Patenaude threw together a collection of plays, called it an offense, but never actually created an offense.
What he needed to do was create a simple scheme that could be transitional scheme from what the team had been doing to what he wants the team to do in the future. That should not have been too hard. At the very least he could have replaced the TO with bubble screens, jail break screens, and the zone read option. The screens would have taken a lot of pressure off the OL and taken advantage of the former AB used to catch and run while the zone read kept the QB running ability as a weapon.
The offense already had an assortment of double options and called dives that could have been retained, perhaps in modified form, and used to very good effect once the screens split the defense wide.
From there he could have gone to work on the passing game. Even then it wasn’t like he had to start from scratch. Just Improving the pass blocking would have done a lot to help even if the passing game itself was unchanged. I felt that the pass blocking was improved this past season. Maybe pass blocking didn’t improve to where it needed to be, but at least the QB had had some time to pass, however little, whereas in the past time in pocket only existed as a fairy tale.