It has been three seasons since the Dallas Cowboys appeared in the NFC playoffs, and "America's Team" is understandably desperate to return to its former glory, even if it means hitting the books a little harder this off-season. In fact, the Cowboys are using one tactic in particular to kick-start their middling offense: geometry quizzes.

Last month, Jason Garrett, the team's Princeton-educated, offensive guru of a head coach, corralled his players in a closed-door team meeting and told them they needed to be intensely familiar with the Pythagorean theorem. That set off a panic in the room.

"There was just a long pause, no one really knew what was going on," said second-year wide receiver Jared Green. "I ran to my room, googled everything just to try to figure out what they were saying. I'm saying, 'What in the world are these people talking about?' I'm a young guy trying to pick up everything in the playbook and they are throwing that out there?"

Garrett's plan, strange as it sounds, wasn't totally without precedent. Sid Gillman, the legendary San Diego Chargers coach credited with inventing many modern offensive tactics during the 1960s and '70s, kept a math professor at a close distance to make sure his passing angles made sense. But never, players and coaches say, has math-based strategy been handed down so directly to a team.

"If you think about the depth of something for a receiver, if you're running a straight line from the line of scrimmage six yards deep, that's a certain depth, it takes a certain amount of time," Garrett said last month. "But if you're doing it 10 yards inside and running to that same spot, that's the hypotenuse of that right triangle. It's longer. They have to understand that."