Fans don't know enough to have intelligent opinions about personnel matters. So I wouldn't want CGC to listen to me even if that were a possibility.
But I have a very hard time thinking of anything Patenaude was responsible for last year that actually worked well. I am willing to give him more time, for sure. But if I were CGC he'd be on a short rope.
By way of counter-example, did you think CPJ had too much patience, or too little patience, when it came to replacing DC's?
I think our defense had a player personnel problem during his time, and I have evidence to support that, so the identity of the DC was not my primary worry. I also think the defensive players had too few practice reps over their college lifespan against offenses they would typically face for them to be truly instinctive in live games.
With that said, I think a root problem with the last HFC is he did not have an underlying defensive philosophy that carried forward from year to year. The DC's could just run whatever. So one year we ran a 4-3. The next a 3-4. One year we'd have a complex Groh defense, and then we'd change it before it was mastered and ran something completely different. This is begging for a lack of continuity on defense, and that is what we suffered. While this is similar to saying we changed DC's too often, it is not identical.
It appears the current coach has an underlying philosophy on both offense and defense, so I am confident the offense will come around as we get the horses in place to successfully implement his offensive philosophy. We had no offensive line and a freshman quarterback and a lack of fitting pieces at wr and rb and a quest to rediscover what a te was or did, and they all were trying to implement a completely different offense. I am amazed we did as much offensively as we did.
You can scapegoat the OC if you want, but all you are doing is scapegoating. The problems were underlying. I personally think scapegoating is abhorrent and will often rise in opposition to it. Sorry if my doing so offends some of you.