There's a funny little rule in soccer that has a seriously large effect on the game.

It's called "offside" and has absolutely no similarity to its football sound-alike. While it encompasses only a couple of sentences in the NCAA soccer rules book, it takes 11 pages of accompanying charts and diagrams to explain. It's also one of the trickier calls for officials, and their getting it right often affects the outcome of a game.

What is it? Well, the rules book says a player is in an offside position "if he or she is nearer to the opponent's goal line than the ball unless the player is in his or her half of the field, or the player is not nearer to the opponent's goal line than at least two opponents."

What?

But wait, that's not all. Merely being in an offside position doesn't warrant a penalty unless (there's that word again) "if at the moment the ball touches or is played by a teammate, the player is involved in active play by either interfering with play or with an opponent, or gaining an advantage by being in that position."

That's why 18 diagrams follow.

The rule's roots dig deep. According to the U.S. Soccer Federation, the sport's national governing body that recently published a user-friendly booklet on offside, the rule was included in the first attempts to record the game's playing parameters in the 1840s. It was called "sneaking" then, and the gist was to prevent players from "camping out" near the goal. Without offside, the federation says, it wouldn't take a lot of skill to score a goal -- just kick the ball close enough to the goal and let the player camped there try to boot it through the wall of defenders. With it, though, the defense has at least one defender and the goalkeeper to protect its turf.

The only changes to the rule in its more than 150 years of existence have been to make it more difficult to be offside and to make it clearer what a player in an offside position can't do. In all that time, while there have been many complaints about how the rule is interpreted and debates about whether changing the rule would open up the offensive aspects of the game, offside has remained relatively on point.

Change hard to come by

The last time questions about the offside rule appeared on the annual soccer rules survey in fact was in 1997, when coaches were asked if they had observed "more appropriate" offside calls during the previous season. Interestingly, almost three-fourths (544 of 754) said they hadn't. But attempts to alter the rule haven't been popular, either. In 1994, 76 percent of almost 700 survey respondents did not support moving the offside line to a point 35 yards from the opponent's goal line (as opposed to midfield). Similarly, in 1992, 78 percent didn't like the FIFA experiment at the previous World Youth Cup at which the offside line was at the 18-yard mark.

The boldest attempt was in 1991, when the NCAA Soccer Rules Committee anounced it simply was eliminating offside inside the 35-yard line beginning with the 1992 season. But reaction was so strong that the committee rescinded the idea the next year. Members subsequently pleaded for conferences to experiment with eliminating offside altogether, but that never gained much traction, either.

What is it, then, about the offside rule that attracts so much criticism yet remains so entrenched as part of the fabric of the sport?

"Genetics," quipped soccer official Ken Andres, an ad hoc member of the soccer rules committee who represents the National Intercollegiate Soccer Officials Association. "It may be a flippant answer, but it's true. It's what makes soccer unique -- it's 'our' rule."

Soccer has plenty of "our rules," which is perhaps why the intercollegiate community largely has left offside alone in the past decade. Members have been busy instead trying to figure out the best way to handle overtimes, tinkering with the complicated card-accumulation system and deciding on substitution rules that accommodate the different philosophies among divisions. Yet, offside remains a popular water-cooler topic.

But it also may be -- as evidenced by previous survey results -- that enough coaches actually like the rule the way it is. Pennsylvania State University's Barry Gorman is one of them.

"It's unique to soccer, and you hate to give it up," said the veteran men's coach who also has served on the Division I Men's Soccer Committee. "It presents a tactical challenge to the players and coaches."

Gorman said without it, the game would be at a stalemate. Having it in place, he said, differentiates teams that can outsmart their opponents.

"Offside includes judgment and decision-making on everyone's part," he said. "Soccer is a free-flowing game. It's not like we can call a timeout and set the defense once we've had a chance to see a particular offensive set. You've got to train your players to adapt during the flow of the game."

Open up the game

Others lament the rule's pinch on what otherwise could be the game's most exciting moments -- the breakaway scoring attempt. Because offside prevents players from receiving a pass while behind their opponents, that one-on-one opportunity between dribbler and goalkeeper is rare.

Seattle Pacific University men's coach Cliff McCrath, who also is the college sport's longtime secretary-rules editor, recalls a moment in world play that defined for him "everything that is wrong with the game." In the 1999 Women's World Cup final between the U.S. and China, a Chinese player late in the 0-0 standoff received a pass while she was, as McCrath said, "not much more than the width of the fabric from a shaggy carpet ahead of her opponent," and the flag went up from the assistant referee, indicating offside and nullifying the play.

"Here was the opportunity for that player to go from 40 yards against (U.S. goalkeeper) Brianna Scurry, who was saying, 'Bring it on, I'm waiting for ya,' " McCrath said. "You have 100,000 people packed in the Rose Bowl and millions more watching on TV, and that opportunity is flagged down -- in a game that needed a goal (before what many believe to be the unsavory method of penalty kicks to break the tie). I said to myself, 'That's everything that's wrong with the game of soccer right there.' "

To be sure, McCrath and others would have preferred a little leniency from the assistant referee at that point. Yet McCrath doesn't advocate the rule's elimination, either, even though he's been part of the rules committee's attempts to modify it over time. But even moving the offside line to somewhere closer than the current midfield stripe, McCrath said, "would polarize the game" to where players would do the "camping out" the rule was designed to prevent -- they'd just camp at the 35-yard line instead of near the goal.

"And if you eliminate it, it would be chaos, a bar fight, a brawl," he said. "There's no meaning in an open field without barriers or fences. You have to have a fence to define your freedom."

Benefit of the doubt

So if the sport's traditionalists can't live without the rule and the game's contemporary advocates can't live with it, what gives?

The officials give.

Over time, no entity has been more important to the game regarding offside than the officials who must correctly interpret it in the heat of battle. Making a split-second decision on a rule that takes hours to understand, though, isn't easy.

"It's flat out the most difficult call in all of sports," Andres said, "not just soccer."

The challenge rests on the shoulders of the assistant referee. In what is called "the diagonal system of control," there are two assistant referees, one on each sideline, diagonally opposed. The head referee controls play throughout the middle of the field but relies on the assistant referees to determine when players are in an offside position. When the assistant, who is looking straight ahead most of the time, spots an infraction, he or she raises the flag, and the head referee can either accept the call or overrule it. Andres said the latter is rare.

What complicates the issue, though, is that an infraction is predicated on the position the player is in "at the moment the ball is touched or played by a teammate." That moment often is well out of the assistant referee's line of vision.

Andres in fact cited studies conducted in Europe that doubt whether human beings are physiologically capable of performing the offside function that assistant referees are asked to do. In essence, they are required to watch two things at once in different locations -- the ball and who is ahead of the ball -- that also are moving. Andres said the studies show that if the event occurs in close proximity, the assistant referee can indeed process the information, but once the play develops over a span of more than 20 yards, they physiologically can't do it.

"Your peripheral vision will not encompass those demands," he said.

McCrath said the mechanics of the diagonal system of control, which was instituted years ago as an alternative to the traditional dual system, "obviate the very thing that the game is trying to achieve."

"We're trying to get offensive excitement, something that will make the fans come alive, the blood rush -- make everyone stand up and scream as they would for a 3-on-2 break in basketball or the bomb in football. Instead, you have a non-playing person (the assistant referee) nullify it before it begins," he said.

Even with the proper mechanics in the rules that do allow for a quick counter or pass, McCrath said, the assistant referee is looking straight across the field to make sure no one is cheating forward. There are times, he said, when the player doesn't put himself in an offside position until after the ball has been played.

"We used to play Simon Fraser (an NAIA school)," McCrath said, "which would trap all the time -- most teams trap you at midfield, but Fraser would trap you when you got out of your car. The best way to break the trap is on ball side, you come to the ball and the guys from behind or away from the ball take off. So you play short-short-long and you beat the trap -- except that the guy taking off is flying and by the time the ball gets to him, he's 15 yards beyond the defenders. He should be allowed to go one-on-one with the goalkeeper, but up goes the flag, because the assistant referee can't see that the ball is already going forward."

Andres said officials in the past several years have been trying to loosen up -- to give the benefit of the doubt to the offense in close calls. But even that probably doesn't solve the dilemma McCrath described. To do that, McCrath said, would require the assistant referee to have a head that operates "like an oscillating fan."

"As much as I like the diagonal system of control, the old dual system (two referees), properly executed by people who were fit enough to execute it, put officials in a better position to let the game flow.

"But you can still have the referee in the center and two assistants on the lines -- just start training those people on the sidelines to allow anything that's close. Start introducing the concept that the assistant referee with reference to the offside rule is like an oscillating fan, which means he continues to scan back and forth. That's a better approach than what we have now."

Andres said officials have been instructed to do just that.

"The way the rule has been administered has changed in the past 20 years. Previously, if it was close it was offside. Now if it's close, the benefit of the doubt goes to the offense," he said.

It must be working, given the fact that there hasn't been an outcry from coaches to change the rule. Penn State's Gorman believes there is an unwritten give and take among coaches and officials that may flare in the heat of battle, then cool quickly.

"We've all been in situations where offside has worked for us and against us," he said. "It's a split-second decision and we have to remember that. We all sit and watch slow-motion replay, and TV announcers can draw the line on the screen during an analysis, but in the heat of the moment, you don't have a stop-action set-up. You still have the human factor in the game where mistakes are made, but mistakes can be made by players and coaches, too."

"It depends on whose ox is being gored," Andres said of the understanding between coaches and referees when it comes to offside. "Most experienced people just accept it as part of the game."

But Gorman said it's a "cerebral" part of the game that needs to stay. "I like soccer because when the whistle blows, it's still the players' game," he said. "The official is part of the environment, but all he does is interpret and apply the rules. It's up to the players to know them."

Still, McCrath is among those who yearn for a less rigid interpretation.

"Here's a game that for years has squandered opportunities to infuse an electric element -- to go one on one with the goalkeeper," he said. "You have a lot of out- standing cat-like goalkeepers who aren't at as much of a disadvantage as was thought when the offside rule was developed. Here we have an opportunity to do something that will allow -- not blatant cherry picking -- but opportunities for electrifying one-on-one scoring chances."

Offside clarification

The International Football Association Board clarified offside in July 2005 by, among other things, incorporating definitions of what it means to "interfere with play," "interfere with an opponent" and "gain an advantage by being in an offside position."

Three forms of involvement:

• Interfering with play

Playing or touching the ball passed or touched by a teammate

• Gaining an advantage

Playing a ball that rebounds off a goal post or the crossbar or off an opponent

• Interfering with an opponent

Preventing an opponent from playing or being able to play the ball by clearly obstructing the opponent's line of vision or movements

Making a gesture or movement that in the opinion of the referee deceives or distracts an opponent