Both the NFL and NCAA currently outlaw leaps in which a leaper who didn’t line up on the line of scrimmage jumps and lands on another player. An NCAA committee has proposed expanding the college rule to ban leaping whether the leaper lands on someone else or not.
There are some loopholes in the current college rule, and it’s not clear if those would survive. The biggest is that a player can’t be penalized if he leaps from the neutral zone or the other team’s side of it. That provision is what most clearly allowed Penn State’s Marcus Allen to leap and block a kick against Ohio State last year, leading to a touchdown runback that turned the Big Ten race on its head.
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The stated reason is, as always, player safety: guys can get tangled up landing, fall on their heads and a whole host of reasons. In the NFL, where this rule originated, it may make a little more sense to protect multimillionaire startes from freak plays that everyone is half-assing; but, in the college game, where special teams result in far more turnarounds and astonishing plays, this seems to just be fear-mongering to the detriment of the sport. I honestly can’t remember the last time, if at all, where the leaping player was catastrophically injured as a result of leaping and not landing on another player.