While the rest of the NFL spent the past couple of weeks searching for the next young offensive genius, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers lured an old one out of retirement, offering their head coaching job to Bruce Arians, 66, on Tuesday.

He checks all the boxes.

Quarterback guru? Check.

Proven winner? Check.

Media darling? Check.

Catchphrase? Check.

His track record speaks for itself.

Or does it?

That track record warrants a closer look.

NFL commentators often use yardage as a measure of a team’s quality. The 2018 Bucs, for example, had the “third-ranked” offense because they gained 6,648 yards. Only the Chiefs and Rams gained more. They also had the “27th-ranked” defense because they allowed 6,134 yards. That method, though easily understood, is at best grossly misleading and at worst a great disservice. Some yards are empty. A 6-yard gain on third and 10 is not the same as a 6-yard gain on third and 5.

There’s a better way to evaluate team performance, as long as you can tolerate acronyms. Football Outsiders strives to measure efficiency by taking every play and comparing a team’s success on that play with the league average. A quick primer on FO’s Defense-adjusted Value Over Average (DVOA) metric:

• It is strongly correlated to wins and takes into account situational factors, such as down and distance, score, field location and time remaining. As the name suggests, it also weighs strength of opponent.

• It’s expressed as a percentage, where a positive percentage indicates an above-average team and a negative percentage indicates a below-average team. For example, the Bucs had a -13.0 percent DVOA this season, meaning that they performed 13 percent worse than league average.

• When separating DVOA by units, the best offenses and special teams have a positive rating, and the best defenses have a negative rating.

Put aside for a moment what you know about Arians from watching Amazon’s All or Nothing series or from reading his book, The Quarterback Whisperer. If you looked only at the Cardinals’ DVOA numbers from 2013 to 2017, you’d think a defensive-minded coach led those teams. The offense was mostly a complement to the defense.

Source: Football Outsiders

Four below-average performances in five seasons — doesn’t look like an offensive mastermind was calling the shots here, does it? Under Dirk Koetter, the Bucs had two above-average performances in three seasons.

Contrary to popular belief, Carson Palmer didn’t blossom into an MVP quarterback the moment he arrived in Arizona in 2013. He was merely average and threw interceptions at about the same rate he threw touchdown passes. But even that was an upgrade over 2012, the season in which the Cardinals rolled out a quarterback rotation of John Skelton, Kevin Kolb, Ryan Lindley and Brian Hoyer.

After a knee injury prematurely ended Palmer’s encouraging 2014 season, he bounced back in 2015 and played better than ever, throwing 35 touchdown passes to only 11 interceptions and averaging a NFL-high 8.7 yards per attempt. It’s not just chance that Arians’ and Palmer’s best seasons coincided with the emergence of running back David Johnson, whom the Cardinals drafted in the third round. Johnson wasn’t their top target; they wanted Ameer Abdullah in the second round, but the Lions nabbed him four picks earlier.

Arizona entered 2016 as a popular Super Bowl pick, but Palmer regressed (26 touchdowns to 14 interceptions) and so did the team. The Cardinals won six fewer games and missed the playoffs.

Another way to look at that chart: Palmer played only 60 of 80 possible regular-season games during Arians’ five seasons. Arizona’s other quarterbacks were Drew Stanton, Blaine Gabbert, Logan Thomas and Lindley. Is that a coach making the most of a bad situation or a coach who failed to devise an adequate backup plan in case his aging starting quarterback declined?

It might not last long, but we could see the same cycle in Tampa Bay, provided Arians can help Jameis Winston rein in the turnovers, bolster the offensive line and acquire a pass-catching running back.

Source: Football Outsiders

Led by Justin Bethel, Calais Campbell, Patrick Peterson, Chandler Jones and Tyrann Mathieu, the Cardinals defense was stacked. Their five-season run as a top-seven unit was reminiscent of the late 1990s/early 2000s Bucs. In that span, Arizona forced the fourth-most takeaways (137), recorded the seventh-most sacks (203) and allowed the sixth-lowest passer rating (83.2).

Source: Football Outsiders

Uh oh. The Bucs have struggled in this phase for years, and if Arians’ track record is any indication, they won’t be getting better. A few takeaways from these ratings:

• The most obvious takeaway is that the Cardinals weren’t executing. That they struggled so consistently makes you wonder about their commitment to improving their special teams.

• The poor ratings could reflect a lack of depth. If a team is built around big-money stars, it will have to settle for replacement-level players at the back end of the roster. In theory, the deeper the team, the better the special teams.

• If a team isn’t getting help from its special teams, it’s going to be overly reliant on its offense and/or defense. That might not seem like a significant disadvantage, but it becomes so over the course of a season. The Bucs didn’t have trouble moving the ball this season, but they did have to sustain longer drives than most teams. Their offense had one of the worst starting field position averages in the league.

Contact Thomas Bassinger at tbassinger@tampabay.com. Follow @tometrics.