By Harry Minium
NORFOLK, Va. – If you were a Georgia Tech football fan, you knew change was coming. You knew someone had to be sacrificed, even though what happened toward the end of the 2021 season wasn't really anyone's fault.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that many of Tech's influential donors were pressuring head coach Geoff Collins to make changes to his staff after the team finished in a tailspin. And since the offense was shut out in its last two games, offensive coordinator Dave Patenaude was one of three good coaches who were let go.
Never mind that he had done an admirable job of transforming Georgia Tech from a run-oriented, triple option to a spread offense, a change that required completely different skill sets for every player on the offensive roster, a job that, in reality, requires a minimum of four years to complete.
Never mind that the Yellow Jackets ranked among the nation's top 50 in offense until injuries took out the starting quarterback and much of the offensive line, or that much of the 2020 season was essentially lost to the pandemic.
Never mind that earlier in the 2021 season, when players were healthy, that the Yellow Jackets blew North Carolina out of the Mercedes Benz Center, 45-22, or that Tech had 580 yards in a loss to Pitt, and 570 yards in a 48-40 overtime loss to Virginia or that the Yellow Jackets' defense was one of the most porous in the nation.
Never mind that the Tech offense was young and talented and should be very good this fall.
Patenaude was the sacrificial lamb, and as has been the hallmark of his career, he accepted the bitter pill with grace.
"I'm never a person who looks at something and wishes it were different," he said. "Everything is a step in your career and life. It's in God's plan to put you where you're supposed to be, and you may not understand why."
That plan apparently was to bring Patenaude to Old Dominion to take over an offense that at times struggled last season.
In this case, Tech's loss was ODU's gain. Adding Patenaude to an already loaded coaching staff was a major step forward.
Patenaude is one of the best offensive minds in the game who was much sought after when he led potent offenses at Coastal Carolina and Temple. With 29 years of coaching experience, he's seen it all. And he brings a sense of maturity that may have been lacking on ODU's offensive staff.
Patenaude arrived at ODU in early January and hit the ground running. He immediately went on the road recruiting, and then returned to begin tutoring the quarterbacks during winter workouts.
ODU is now just a little halfway through spring practice and by all accounts, Patenaude is making improvements to the Monarch offense and is popular among players.
"Coach P, he's been awesome," said veteran offensive lineman Nick Saldiveri. "He obviously knows his stuff. And he's personable. I can go in his office and chill and listen to some music with him and have a good time.
"There's something great about a coach when you can have a personal relationship with him."
Ali Jennings III, the transfer from West Virginia who led ODU in receiving yards last season, said the players like Patenaude and respect his long and accomplished record. At 53, he is by far the oldest coach at ODU, which had the nation's youngest staff last season.
He's more than a decade older than head coach Ricky Rahne.
"He seems younger than his age," Jennings said. "He's an older guy but has a younger energy about him.
"I knew him when he coached at Temple. He recruited me a little and we had a good relationship then. He's a good guy. And he's doing good things with our offense."
Patenaude is a blue collar guy who went to Catholic school in his hometown of Norwich, Connecticut. At the time, a textile mill dominated the town's economy and like so many manufacturing plants in the rust belt, it's long since closed. A recent plan to turn it into condos failed.
His grandparents immigrated to Norwich from Quebec, Canada and, while his parents often spoke French Canadian at home, the language didn't stick with their children.
He took Spanish in high school and regrets not taking French.
"My parents spoke French, but the only time I heard it was when they didn't want me to know what they were saying," he said.
"My family migrated from Quebec into Maine, New Hampshire and Connecticut because that's where the weavers were going."
His last name often gets butchered by people who don't know him. FYI, it's pronounced "Pat-in-ode." And he's proud of his French Canadian heritage.
His father worked as a corrections officer and his mom in the mill. They were loving parents but also strict.
Patenaude's birth was what you might call a pleasant surprise. He was an "oops" baby. He was born when his parents were in their early 40s. "I know it's not unusual now, but back then, nobody was having a kid in their 40s," he said with a laugh.
His two older sisters were largely out of the house, not that he lacked for company.
"There were hundreds of kids my age," he said. "There was always a football game, a basketball game, a baseball game.
"That was the time when mom said come home when the street lights come on."
Certainly, a much simpler time than today.
Basketball courts were two houses away and he'd jump over the back fence of his house onto a baseball field. Like most of the neighborhood kids, he went to mass every Sunday.
"It was kind of a cloistered, blue-collar community," he said. "It was a good place to grow up."
No one had a lot of money, so a good work ethic was necessary to survive.
He took his work ethic with him to Central Connecticut State, where he played football as both a quarterback and free safety and got the coaching bug.
His coaching career began in 1991 at the Coast Guard Academy as the running backs coach and from there he gradually moved up the coaching ladder.
He moved to Springfield College in Massachusetts for two seasons and then to Fordham for four years, where he coached tight ends, wide receivers and eventually quarterbacks.
He then moved to Columbia in 1998, where he served as offensive coordinator in 2001. He was the head coach at New Haven in 2002 and 2003 but then the school dropped football. It was not to be the last time he and his family's life was turned upside down by a program being terminated.
He then moved to Holy Cross in 2004, where he met a young and up and coming graduate assistant named Ricky Rahne. They instantly clicked and have been friends ever since.
He then went to Hofstra, where he coached three years, the last two as offensive coordinator. Hofstra beat UMass 52-38 in its final game in 2009 and the coaches were on the road recruiting when they learned the school was dropping football.
For the second time in his career, he was devastated that a program he helped mold was gone in an instant. But as he said, perhaps his next move was predestined, because when he went to Georgetown, he met coaches he would later work with at Coastal Carolina.
"As my wife said, if that hadn't happened, I might not have gotten the chance to coach at Coastal Carolina or later at Temple," he said.
In 2012, he got the break he was looking for, and was named offensive coordinator at Coastal Carolina for then head coach Joe Moglia, who was building an FCS powerhouse that would eventually become a successful FBS program.
He then had two successful seasons at Temple before moving with Collins to Georgia Tech in 2019.
Patenaude and his wife, Christine, have two daughters and he acknowledges that the constant job changes can be hard on his family.
His wife and youngest daughter, Estelle, remain in Atlanta to finish out the school year. His oldest daughter, Eva, is enrolled at Fordham, so at this point it doesn't mean much to her where her parents live.
"All she wants to know is, where am I coming home for spring break," he said.
The move will be tougher on Estelle, who is 13, an age when it's difficult to leave your friends. This will be her third move in five years.
"It's tough," Panenaude said. "She understands the reality of what we do but also the excitement of what we do. She's been to all of these cool places. And that's the way we frame it. What's the next adventure for us? It's not a sense of disappointment, it's a sense of excitement.
"But still, when you're 13 years old and you're being taken away from your friends, there's a certain level of uneasiness with that.
"My older daughter has told my younger one, 'your friends are going to remain your friends.' She still goes to the Outer Banks with her friends from Coastal Carolina."
The family is again moving to a beach community and he has plans to buy a house at the north end of Virginia Beach.
"Our plan is to stay here at least long enough for my daughter to graduate from high school," he said.
"We plan to put down roots."
Patenaude watched from afar last season as Old Dominion staged a dramatic late-season run. After losing six of their first seven games, the Monarchs won their last five to go to a bowl game for the first time since 2016.
It was a dramatic turnaround for a program that went 5-7 in 2017, 4-8 in 2018, 1-11 in 2019 and then did not play in 2020 because of the pandemic.
Rahne was the offensive coordinator at Penn State when he came to ODU in 2020. Although he's been at ODU more than two years, last season was his first being able to field a team.
Patenaude and Rahne remained close over the years, especially during his years at Temple, when they often ran into each other at camps or on the recruiting trail. They were comfortable with each other, and they both essentially have the same offensive philosophy.
After Kirk Campbell was let go as ODU's offensive coordinator and Patenaude fired at Tech, Rahne and Patenaude talked before the Monarchs' Myrtle Beach Bowl game against Tulsa.
"I talked to him briefly and said we'd get back together after the bowl game," Rahne said. "When we talked after the bowl game, it just made sense to both of us.
"This was a good fit for him, and obviously he's a good fit for Old Dominion."
Going 1-0 every day, which means focusing on practice or watching film or only on the next opponent, has been Rahne's mantra since he came to ODU.
It's also Patenaude's, and he said the Monarchs exhibited why that's so important. They would not have been able to win five in a row without focusing only on the present.
"Those guys very well could have thrown their hands up and said, 'this isn't working,' but they didn't," he said. "They stayed the course and they got better.
"That was impressive. That was a sign that Ricky has the right guys here, that they had buy-in to his philosophy. That was really attractive to me. That's the kind of place you love to coach."
When he visited ODU and saw S.B. Ballard Stadium, the campus and both downtown Norfolk and Virginia Beach, he was sold.
They met shortly after the bowl game and the deal was quickly done.
"Dave has so much experience and has so much football knowledge," Rahne said.
"There's a real comfort level there with him and I knew he would work well with our coaching staff."
Patenaude said he won't make many changes to ODU's offense. Jennings said the changes he's seen have been designed "to make us more explosive.
"He's definitely revamping the offense, but I'm not sure the fans will really notice the changes."
One of Patenaude's most important roles is to recruit quarterbacks, and with that, he has an ace in the hole.
"Our head coach," he said, "is one of the best quarterback coaches in the country.
"That's not something you can say about many programs."
Patenaude was hesitant to speak at length about his departure from Georgia Tech – it was the first time in his career that he's been fired. But he notes that in the current atmosphere in college athletics, there isn't much patience.
That wasn't true more than three decades ago when Virginia Tech athletic director Dave Braine was pressured to fire Frank Beamer, who had gone 24-40-1 in six seasons. He refused, saying the Hokies had the right coach.
Beamer went on to take the Hokies to 23 consecutive bowl games, win two ACC championships and lead Tech to the 1999 national championship game against Florida State.
Patience paid off.
"If you take a classic guitarist and teach him to play Led Zeppelin, he's going to be able to play it but not well," Patenaude said. Going from a triple option offense to the spread was a similar change, he said.
Lineman can be smaller as long as they can chop block. Receivers aren't recruited for their ability to catch so much as block. Much the same is true at quarterback, where the ability to run and make quick decisions on whether to keep the ball, hand off or pitch it is far more important than passing.
The roster had to be completely remade.
"My goal has always been to go in, identify what the issues are and fix them and leave the place better than it was when you got there," he said.
"I feel like I did that at Tech."
And he's not crying in his beer about where he is now.
"When it first happened, you play the martyr, the victim," he said. "But then you turn around and see maybe this happened because it was God's plan that it's supposed to be.
"I've never been a person to look back. There's a reason why your rearview mirror is small, and your windshield is so big. If you're spending your time look at your rearview mirror, you're not seeing where you're going.
"Now we're part of this family here at ODU. Let's make ODU the best it can be and not worry about how we got here.
"This program has so much potential."
He saw that potential in 2012 when Coastal Carolina played at ODU in the FCS playoffs. ODU won, 63-35, and while the game was played in old Foreman Field, Patenaude said he's never forgotten the sellout crowd that watched the game.
"The place was packed and the fans were living and dying with the team," he said. "I thought to myself, 'these fans get it.' You don't often go into a stadium and feel that electricity, that energy. It was a lot of fun."
Rahne said that Patenaude has fit seamlessly into the ODU coaching staff.
"The guys have responded well to him," he said. "The quarterbacks have made some progress and we were able to clean up some things in the system that got away from us.
"At times, you add things here and there and then when you look at it, you realize it doesn't make any sense. I'm really happy with the direction of the organization."
Patenaude said the offense he's run "is very similar to Ricky's."
Patenaude said the offense ODU opens up with against Virginia Tech on Friday, Sept. 3, will be tailored to the Monarch quarterback, and it isn't yet known who that will be. Returning starter Hayden Wolff, Notre Dame transfer Brendon Clark and returnees D.J. Mack Jr. and Reese Poffenbarger are all getting a look.
Much of spring practice has been spent analyzing their strengths and weaknesses.
"You have to play to the strength of who that guy is," he said. "You can't ask your quarterback to do things he doesn't do well.
"Everybody has a skill set and everybody here should be proficient in the core things. But some guys are going to throw better, some guys are going to run better, some guys are going to think better and make decisions better.
"My job is to get them to fully understand the core of our offense, then see who that guy is."
Patenaude said the lessons his parents taught him, and the life lessons he learned growing up in a working-class community, still resonate.
"People say what coaches do is hard," he said. "Being sick or your kids being sick or not having a job or struggling to pay the mortgage, that's what I call hard.
"I grew up in a town where your work ethic, your toughness, your ability to grind it out meant everything. When you barely had enough to make the rent, that was hard.
"If you're fortunate enough to love what you do in life, you love what you do every day, count yourself blessed. My mom and dad, they worked until retirement age.
"Then she got cancer and she was gone. That was tough.
"You have to put things in perspective. People say that the hours suck or travel sucks when you're coaching but very few people get out of the game.
"When these young guys come in and you know you've had a positive impact on what they are thinking or doing, that's really a special opportunity, that's a privilege.
"The football part of that job, that's really awesome. But if you're in it for the right reason, you're doing it to help the kids.
"When you look back at the long haul of what you did in your career, you know that if you instilled the right things, then you're doing the right thing, that you're in the right profession."
And Patenaude is clearly in the right profession.
Minium: Dave Patenaude Brings Blue Collar Work Ethic and Maturity to ODU Football Offense
