No one is wearing 67 (and other jersey number crimes)

Hi everyone! Today we’re back with another one of my favorite topics: jersey numbers.

Prior to the 2023-24 season, NCAA basketball players were restricted to wearing numbers containing the digits 0-5. This was supposedly so the refs could more easily signal them with their five fingers, even though players have been wearing larger numbers in the WNBA basically since the beginning of time without causing mass confusion.²

In 2023, the NCAA finally caught up with reality, and declared that players would finally be allowed to wear any integer between 0 and 99. Notably, teams are allowed to have one 0 OR 00 on the team, but not both. (did they think a team would want both ?)

This opened up dozens of options for jersey numbers that had never been worn in D1 women's basketball history, ever. You would think players would be all over this (I know I would be), especially in the NIL era when standing out matters to lots of players. But three years in, the data tells a different story.

As usual, feel free to let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see from these posts! I’m still getting used to writing and I’m always open to ideas. Would you like to see more code, less code, more charts, fewer charts?? Literally idk how this website works but if it lets you comment that’s great, and if not you can message me on Instagram :)

When I first set off to do this research in 2023, I really struggled to find comprehensive data of every college basketball player’s jersey number. Luckily, I eventually found that the player box score table from the wehoop R package contains a “athlete_jersey” value every time a player is listed for a game, so that’s what we will be using here!

The wbb_player_box data frame contains hundreds of thousands of rows, each representing individual player games. From this we can simply filter to unique players (either by their name and school combo, or by their unique athlete_id, which is probably better) to create a list of each player and their jersey number. This gives us a table of 6,544 players that have been listed in a game’s box score this season.

If we further filter our data to only include players with jersey numbers containing the previously forbidden 6, 7, 8, or 9, the beginning of the results look something like this:

This means 605 players have worn a "new" jersey number so far this season (games through 12/27/2025). Note that the data includes box scores for every game involving a D1 school, which occasionally captures non-D1 opponents and their players. I could have filtered to only D1 schools or required a minimum of four games played as a proxy for D1 status, but I've kept everyone in since the number of non-D1 players is negligible.

So what does the growth in the new jersey numbers actually look like? Since the rule change took effect in 2023-24, adoption of these new numbers has accelerated each year. That first season, only 80 players suited up with a digit from 6-9 on their jersey, which prompted me to make my only good YouTube video I’ve ever made about the phenomenon.

The next year, the number of players jumped to 373. And this season, we're already at 606 players, more than seven times the amount of players from 2023-24. The growth is exponential (ish) for sure, but as the next sections will show, it's growth in a very specific, very safe direction.

While 606 players are wearing previously disallowed digits this season, the vast majority are playing it safe with single digits 6, 7, 8, and 9. These four numbers account for the overwhelming bulk of adoption, with hundreds of players rocking each one.

But what about the double digits? The real frontier? That's where things get interesting! And by interesting, I mean almost not interesting at all!

Only ten players have suited up with a number greater than 55 this season. Out of thousands of D1 women's basketball players, just 10 are wearing numbers in the 56-99 range, and three of those are specifically wearing number 77. The table below is literally the entire list. It is likely that most of these players are the first in NCAA women’s basketball history to wear these numbers.

The gaps in this are crazy. No one is wearing 67. Or 69 (annoying). Or 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, or 98. That's 35 numbers between 56 and 99 that are still waiting for someone to claim them!!

The new numbers make up 64% of all possible options. But only 9% of players (605 out of 6,544) are wearing them. Think about that: nearly two-thirds of the menu is being ignored by more than 90% of players.

So why aren't more players taking advantage? A few theories have popped up in my comments over the years.

Some schools might still be restricting players to traditional numbers, either out of institutional tradition or just resistance to change. College sports are deeply rooted in tradition, and jersey numbers are no exception. It's also possible some jersey manufacturers were slow to stock the physical digits 6-9, creating a practical barrier in the early years of the rule change.

Another likely factor is high school influence. The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) still restricts high school basketball players to the traditional 0-5 digits¹. Players coming into college are probably attached to their high school numbers, which means they're naturally gravitating toward the lower digits they've worn for years. Why change what's familiar?

That said, the year-over-year growth makes sense when you consider roster turnover. Players who were already on rosters before the 2023 rule change likely kept their existing numbers rather than switching mid-career. But each new freshman class has the opportunity to choose from the full range of available numbers from day one, which helps explain why adoption keeps climbing each season.

International players, however, might be a different story. I haven't run the numbers on this yet, but anecdotally it seems like a disproportionate number of the higher jersey numbers belong to international recruits. This makes sense, since many international leagues don't have the same digit restrictions. With the number of international players in women's college basketball steadily increasing, we might see more adventurous number choices in the future simply because those players are coming from systems where #77 or #89 is perfectly normal.

In any case, I stay disappointed by the lack of creativity in the NCAA jersey number scene.

NIL has turned jersey numbers into actual intellectual property. Athletes can trademark their numbers, sell personalized jerseys, and build marketing campaigns around them. Being the first player ever to wear #67 (or 69 hehe) could be a genuine branding angle and something memorable that helps you stand out when you're competing for attention with thousands of other players. Yet, most players are passing this up.

So if you're a college basketball player looking to make history, you know what to do. Pick a number no one has ever worn. Build your brand around it. And three years from now, maybe I'll be writing about how you started a trend instead of wondering why 67 and 69 are still sitting there unclaimed. Please :<

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