I went to UVA while he was our offensive coordinator, so here are my thoughts from a comment I made in the "Lazor to Lions" thread yesterday:
Lazor ran a very traditional pro-style offense, somewhat conservative for the most part, but nonetheless fairly effective. We won 8 games in 2011, our best season with him on board. That year, he got surprisingly good production out of a pretty unheralded QB in Michael Rocco, a decent-at-best set of RBs, and a receiving corps lacking any real stars or physical types.
I always felt that he had a good head for coaching, a decent feel for playcalling, and a knack for coming up with solid game plans that our team could execute well, despite relatively limited offensive talent. As I see it, he was mostly held back by two major factors:
1) Aforementioned limited talent. He never got the chance to work with a reliable QB at Virginia, or anything better than passable RBs and possession receivers. Now he'll have Stafford, Bush & Bell, and Megatron et al.
2) Our head coach, Mike London, has to be one of the worst in college football. Long story short, he insisted on QB rotations with mediocre backups, when it was clear that Lazor's offense functioned better with a single starter. Lazor left after 2012, and we won 2 games in 2013 behind an offense that was almost completely unwatchable. And somehow London didn't get canned, but that's a subject for another post on another sub...
Bottom line: I liked what I saw in Lazor's ability to design an offense with limited talent in college, so I think this is a good move for the Lions, given their wealth of riches on that side of the ball.
This was in response to a comment from /u/tee2green , another UVA alum who made these points:
We always had a pretty decent offense despite not having a whole lot of talent. We had QB Michael Rocco carry us to 4 straight wins in 2011 and our first road win at FSU in a loooong time.
His offenses were pretty vanilla though. Loved to run the ball. Almost always 11 or 12 personnel. One guy goes in motion striaght across the formation. Single back power runs. Loved the rollout dumpoff to the TE. Guaranteed 5-6 yards.
