Actually, allowing 100-199 is not that bad an idea.

Or require unique numbers for each player and limit game-day rosters to 99 players... I mean, seriously, how often does anyone who is lower than 3rd string play in any particular game?

Pick a blowout this weekend and look at the box scores. Especially when it's the home team doing the blowing out... You'd be surprised.

Also, it doesn't take 100 players to need to used duplicate numbers, given that specific positions are number restricted - it just takes too many at a particular position to cause an issue.

On my college team, we had about 120-140 players each year, and we were quite good (D-III, 48-5 in my 4 years there), with a lot of blowout wins.

Still, it was very rare that anyone below the 3rd string would play on a given Saturday.

And the only number restrictions are 50-79 for interior offensive linemen, which gives you a maximum of 30 numbers that have to go to linemen (more than enough), and 68 numbers for everyone else. Of course, you see defensive linemen and linebackers wearing 50-79 numbers all the time, so you could easily do 20 O-linemen and 78 others, or whatever you wanted.

Retired numbers might cause problems. But that's not the NCAA's problem, in the strictest sense.

I wouldn't be against 3-digit numbers either... just saying that limiting to 99 individually-numbered players per game would be one way to get around this problem.

See, if the format were 99.9, you wouldn't have to change any of the eligible receiver numbering rules and the ratio of the player numbers in those positions would stay almost the same. Instead of there being 30 numbers from 50 thru 79, there'd be 291 numbers: 50, 50.1,..., 78.9, 79 .

Poses an interesting issue for teams that wish to retire numbers. Does Ohio State retire all #27 combinations (#27.0 .. #27.0)? Or just #27.0?