Validation Range keeps excluding some cells

Hello Excel gurus! I have a football bowl sheet I've been doing for years but finally ran into a snag. This sheet is meant to score each college football bowl game in points with "confidence points" 1 through 41 assigned to each game. I have a validation range that includes 41 cells (one for each college football bowl game) that are each a dropdown list. However, when I select all 41 cells, it routinely will include all but the last two cells I select and I can't figure out what I have done to cause this to happen. I've tried every solution I can think of and I'm convinced I've done something wrong to cause this. It won't let me edit the validation range and add those last two cells. Been trying everything I can think of for the past two nights.

The dropdown list in each of the 41 cells references Column C on a hidden sheet that shows numbers 1-41 down the column. The equation used is as follows:
=OFFSET(Sheet3!$C$1,0,0,COUNT(Sheet3!$C$1:$C$41))

My Validation Range is simply titled "ValidationRange". The idea is to have each cell show a dropdown of numbers 1-41. Each time a number is selected in a cell, the other cells will not show that number -- when all 41 cells are filled in, each will have a number 1-41.

Here are the equations used on the 41 lines of my hidden sheet (first being Column A, second is down Column B, and third is down Column C):

=IF(COUNTIF($B$1:$B$41,ROW())=0,ROW())

=SMALL(ValidationRange,ROW())

=SMALL($A$1:$A$41,ROW())

Any idea what is happening here that is not allowing me to include all 41 cells in my validation range? I'm on Excel 2016. Thanks in advance for taking a peek at this.

Thanks for looking at this for me. I've attached a bare-bones version that is small enough to attach here.

Your Data validation range ("ValidationRange") excludes H107 and X107 and has (it appears) reached the limit of the length of the entry field.

Correct. But it worked last year on 42 cells. I can't figure out why it won't work this year for 41.

As the ValidationRange is incorrect: what has changed as I cannot see how it worked before if the H107/X107 cells were excluded and presumably one other cell to make the 42.

Here's last year's sheet that worked with 42 cells in the validation range. Maybe this will help.

No idea as I cannot even edit the named ranges.

I did a work around assigning the H/X cells to G1:G41 in the attached and using this range as the "ValidationRange"

See attached

Attachment?

... sorry ...

John, you're a genius. It worked! Thank you VERY much for your help.

Glad to help.

If that takes care of your original question, please select Thread Tools from the menu link above and mark this thread as SOLVED. Thanks.