Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.
Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:
Npars01