There were 3:32 left in the first quarter of Minnesota’s 20-14 win over Michigan on Saturday. The Wolverines had the ball at the 50-yard line on first down. Bryce Underwood threw incomplete toward Andrew Marsh, and Minnesota edge rusher Anthony Smith arrived and laid him out.
No flag. No ejection. And because no flag was thrown, the play never went to the automatic replay review that accompanies every in-game targeting call.
That is the whole problem.
Nothing has been announced by anyone
Let us be precise, because this story has been floating around all weekend with more certainty than the facts support.
As of Sunday, no discipline has been announced. The Big Ten has issued no statement. Neither has Minnesota, Michigan, PJ Fleck, Kyle Whittingham, Anthony Smith or Bryce Underwood. Nobody has been fined, suspended or ruled to have broken a rule.
What has been reported, by media rather than by the conference itself, is that the Big Ten is weighing whether postgame discipline is warranted under its sportsmanship policy and the experimental postgame targeting-review rules it has in place for 2026. Minnesota could also choose to act on its own. Neither of those things has happened.
Sports Illustrated’s read was that the hit “looked clean but official review may determine the contact was illegal.” That is roughly where this sits: a hard hit on a quarterback who had just released the ball, with no official finding either way.
There is precedent for a suspension, and precedent for nothing
USC suspended linebacker Desman Stephens II for one game after a targeting ejection for a hit on an Oregon quarterback. Northwestern’s C.J. Robbins got a one-game suspension for punching an opponent. Conferences and schools do hand out postgame penalties.
They also decline to, constantly, when a hit is judged clean. Smith was not flagged on the field by officials watching it live, which is a data point in his favor that keeps getting skipped over.
Who Anthony Smith is
Smith is a fifth-year redshirt senior defensive end out of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. He wears No. 0, stands 6-foot-6, weighs 280 pounds and turned 22 in May.
Last season he was the best edge rusher in the Big Ten. He started all 13 games and put up 38 tackles, 17.5 tackles for loss and 12.5 sacks, leading the conference in sacks and becoming the first Minnesota player to do that since 2000. He was first-team All-Big Ten and entered 2026 as the league’s preseason Defensive Player of the Year.
This season has been quieter. Through five games Smith has seven tackles, 1.5 sacks and 1.5 tackles for loss. A player ranked No. 39 on The Athletic’s Freaks List is on pace for a fraction of last year’s production, and he is a 2027 NFL Draft prospect who needs the tape.
Underwood finished the game, and it did not go well
Underwood stayed in. He is 19 years old, a sophomore, 6-foot-4 and 230 pounds, out of Belleville High School in Michigan, and he was the consensus No. 1 overall recruit in the 2025 class.
Against Minnesota he went 10-of-21 for 101 yards with no touchdowns and two interceptions, and added 10 carries for 20 yards. He was still out there with 37 seconds left, throwing on fourth-and-5 from midfield, and the pass sailed out of bounds.
Michigan managed 180 total yards and fell to 3-2, 0-2 in Big Ten play, in Whittingham’s first season.
Here is our take: the Big Ten built a postgame review mechanism precisely for plays the officials did not flag, and it has to actually use it or stop pretending it exists. Review the hit, say what you found, and say it publicly. Letting a weekend of speculation substitute for a ruling serves nobody, least of all Anthony Smith.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.