Illegal number--NCAA

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by Kansas Ref

What makes a jersey # "illegal"? Is it due to the perceived difficulty that refs would have when signaling the jersey number with hands at the score table?

Keep in mind that in the not too distant past there was only one hand reporting in high school games.

NBA jerseys have always featured numbers. As in baseball, anything from 0 to 99 goes.

Basketball leagues at all levels in the U.S. traditionally use single and double digits between 0 and 5 (i.e. 0, 00, 1–5, 10–15, 20–25, 30–35, 40–45 and 50–55). The NCAA and most amateur competitions mandate that only these numbers be used because it eases nonverbal communication between referees, who use fingers to denote a player’s number, and the official scorer. In college basketball, single-digit player numbers are officially recorded with a leading zero.

The NBA has always allowed other numbers between 0 and 99, but the use of digits 6 through 9 is less common than 0 through 5 since players tend to keep their numbers from college.