by eagletx on Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:04 am
Inside the waiver process after Cade Mays transferred to Tennessee from Georgia
By David Ubben Jan 16, 2020 136
Tom Mars knows that many interested parties want to know the details. He’s just not interested in their opinions or desires.
“The only people whose opinions matter to me are the people in Indianapolis on the (NCAA’s) legislative relief staff,” said Mars, the lawyer who is aiding Tennessee in offensive lineman Cade Mays’ efforts to gain immediate eligibility after transferring from Georgia earlier this month rather than having to sit out the 2020 season.
Mars is well aware that his refusal to provide further details produces an information vacuum that interested onlookers are more than willing to fill with speculation he says is uninformed.
First off, about that $3.5 million lawsuit Cade Mays’ father filed against Georgia and a chair manufacturer?
“It won’t play any role” in Mays’ waiver case, Mars said.
Mars is uninvolved in that suit and said Thursday he had yet to read the suit, outside of media reports about it.
Last week, Mars and Georgia sparred about who leaked the lawsuit, which is based on an incident involving Kevin Mays on a recruiting trip in 2017 and was filed on Dec. 5, more than a month before Cade Mays announced a transfer to Tennessee. Mays traveled with Georgia to the Sugar Bowl and participated before leaving school days later.
Mars alleged Georgia leaked the suit, which first became public just hours after reports surfaced that Mays was headed to Tennessee. Georgia denied the allegation.
“Unlike Mr. Mars, we will not engage in a public discussion of a student eligibility matter,” Georgia said in the statement. “Although the Mays lawsuit is a public document available on the internet, no one at UGA was authorized to discuss it, we’re not aware of anyone who did so and the reporter who broke the story of the lawsuit has stated he was not notified by anyone at UGA.”
Mars doubled down on his allegation with a statement that included emojis of a dog and a growing nose like Pinocchio.
Mays is back in his hometown of Knoxville, attending college and preparing to play football with his younger brother Cooper, who signed with the Vols in December and enrolled at Tennessee a semester early. They’re working on their skills and physique during the program’s winter conditioning program.
Last Thursday, Tennessee officially announced the 6-foot-6, 318-pound junior as a member of the Vols.
“Cade is a great fit because of his familiarity with Tennessee and Knoxville,” Vols coach Jeremy Pruitt said in a statement. “He will get to play with his brother, Cooper, at the school where his dad, Kevin, played. As a guy with multiple years of starting experience on the offensive line in the SEC, Cade is a tremendous addition to our program. He’s tough and he’s powerful, and he is a versatile player who can line up anywhere on the offensive line. He will have an impact on the field, and he will also have a positive effect on our team and in the offensive line room with his leadership ability.”
Mars and Tennessee’s compliance staff are working on making sure Cade Mays is eligible by the time Tennessee’s season begins with a home date against Charlotte on Sept. 5. In a wide-ranging Thursday conversation with The Athletic, Mars reiterated his stance that he’s “highly confident” Mays will be granted a waiver, saying now is the time to “trust the process.”
That process involves collecting screenshots of direct messages on social media and text messages, asking various parties to write personal statements and gathering other evidence to support Mays’ claim for a waiver.
Some waiver requests can be a simple personal statement from an athlete and maybe a few extra pages. Others can be as long as 300 pages, including medical records and explanations of those medical records for the NCAA committee.
Mars is still helping piece together Mays’ file. He expects it to be “somewhere in the middle” of that range. But he’s not interested in providing any details about the central argument he’ll be making to the relief committee.
“In this case, there’s no value in being more explicit about what happened,” Mars said. “Being at all transparent about what happened would probably not sit well with Georgia fans anyway. Because I don’t think any of those Georgia fans want to hear anything that’s the least bit critical of their school’s athletic department or their football coaching staff. In fact, the decision to remain quiet about this is a very principled decision. It’s not one that’s necessarily to the advantage of Cade Mays or his family. It’s one that’s the appropriate approach and an approach that’s respectful toward Georgia.
“I’m sitting in Atlanta right now. I’m not interested in trashing UGA, and there’s no benefit to doing that. And even if I tried to be very diplomatic about it, I’m sure what I had to say would not sit well with anybody in Athens or anybody that’s part of Dawg Nation. The decision to not talk about it is not only a decision that reflects the privacy every student-athlete has, it’s also a decision that reflects respect for the process and for UGA. If UGA wanted to try this case in the press, I’d be happy to. But I don’t think they want to. And therefore, I don’t have any desire to.”
Mays is entering a process that’s gotten more complicated and more heated as waivers have become increasingly common. Mars had no intention of becoming the most prominent lawyer who helps athletes pursuing immediate eligibility. However, he had high-profile successes with multiple athletes who left Ole Miss after Hugh Freeze was fired, including quarterback Shea Patterson. He followed that up by helping Justin Fields earn a waiver at Ohio State after leaving Georgia following the 2018 season.
Mars has become the first call for many on these issues. In 2018, it used to be parents or players contacting him. In 2019, college head coaches began showing up on his caller ID to inquire about using his services. Mars also even joined the NCAA as an “independent external advocate” on the Complex Case Unit, but his association does not prohibit him from working on the immediate eligibility cases that brought him to prominence within college football.
The Athletic asked Mars if he was involved in Tennessee’s successful waiver request for Aubrey Solomon last year.
“I’ve never lied to a sports writer or misrepresented anything, and I’m not going to start now,” he said. “I’d rather not say.”
Mars’ success also had another major side effect: Covering the desks of the legislative relief staff with more waiver cases than ever. In 2019, the number of cases those case managers at the NCAA were dealing with exploded by 300 to 500 percent, “depending on which case manager you were talking to,” Mars said.
“The majority of those waiver requests had no merit,” Mars said. “People were stretching left and right and coming up with all kinds of creative reasons they were trying to fit into the mitigating circumstances rule.”
Mars had successfully “driven a truck through that loophole” of the simple requirement of mitigating circumstances, so the NCAA’s fix last June was to change the wording to “extraordinary, extenuating, mitigating circumstances beyond a student-athlete’s control,” rather than just the phrase “mitigating circumstances” he’d previously exploited.
The additional language made it more difficult to achieve a waiver, though it muddied the waters of who was given waivers and who was not, with little clarity. Student privacy laws prevent the NCAA or universities from commenting on the details of decisions.
It also produced a frustration across the sport for perceived inconsistencies, but Mars says some of that is a product of the compliance offices handling of cases. He pointed to Ohio State as the “gold standard” of compliance offices and said Tennessee’s Andrew Donovan and Adam Tate are “among the best in the business.”
Some schools would have their compliance office handle waiver requests on their own and call Mars later for an appeal of a denial.
“In those cases that I’ve not been involved in, the written advocacy varies from excellent to pathetic. It’s all across the board, and that’s one of the reasons we’re seeing what I prefer to call ‘perceived inconsistencies’ in who gets a waiver,” Mars said. “Often times, the results that appear to be inconsistent decisions aren’t the result of inconsistent decisions by decision makers in Indianapolis. They’re the result of one compliance office doing an excellent job presenting the case on behalf of the student-athlete and the other compliance staff doing a terrible job.”
In Mars’ view, the fix is simple, and it’s one with plenty of momentum across the sport. College football needs a one-time free transfer for every athlete and it needs one “within the next few months,” Mars said.
“Over the past few years, they’ve consistently done what they did in June, which is add a couple words here and add a couple words there,” Mars said. “It’s almost like Frankenstein’s monster. It’s the legislative equivalent. You don’t realize what you’ve created until the very end and you just need to destroy it and start over”
Now, Mays and others like him are stuck in the middle, likely headed for immediate eligibility amid countless questions about why the family would prefer not to answer and the lingering possibility that he won’t be able to play next fall while his request is being processed.
“(Taking on waiver cases) has exposed me to what people are going through. These are real people. They haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not treason to leave a university,” Mars said. “They haven’t done anything wrong and they pay a big penalty by making a decision that’s in their best interest.”