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Originally Posted by Warrenkicker
I feel the numbering requirements were established so that it was easier for the defense and the officials to be able to determine who would be eligible.
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Exactly. But the forward pass was played for longer without an eligible receiver numbering rule than it has been with one. No doubt about it, the requirement of eligible receiver numbering was as much a decision to hamper the offense as legalizing the forward pass was to help it. But it did have the byproduct of making the officials' jobs easier on net.
Before that it was common to shift players onto & off the line to produce new end and back positions and hide eligible receivers. They didn't play "A-11" because there were more subtle ways to do it. And most of that time the rules regarding position on the line or in the backfield were more complicated than today's fairly easy landmarks; in Canadian football it was a judgement call. And to this day it's common to dispense with eligible receiver numbering in youth football.
I notice (as with Mr. Redding's remark "in the history of college football" quoted in another thread) that football administrators tend to have a time horizon in thinking about the game that doesn't take into account anything from the time before they were familiar with. What's "normal" to football depends on what time period you consider it over.
Robert