Reviewing a key NCAA interview from the Amarius Mims Saga

An unprecedented NCAA violation, about a month following an unprecedented snub to add insult to injustice, was passed down to Florida State last December for an unprecedented transfer recruitment.

The run of unprecedented occurrences to happen to FSU these last few years has been nothing short of uncanny. And, of course, unprecedented. 

FSU received an NCAA violation – a Level II infraction – in January of 2024. It marked the first time the NCAA has severed the relationship between a school and its NIL collective as part of an infractions case per ESPN…a move that is unlikely to happen again as the NCAA has received legal pushback and halted NIL enforcement while the country’s president has explored creating a commission (currently paused) to oversee college sports and NIL in place of the NCAA .

At the heart of this violation: Amarius Mims. 

Mims, a former five-star recruit from central Georgia who stayed in-state to attend UGA and eventually went on to be a first-round draft pick in 2024, had a brief second recruitment when he entered the NCAA’s Transfer Portal in April of 2022. That short-lived time back on the open market led to a frenzy of Florida schools making a run at the rarest of Portal commodities: A star offensive tackle. 

In that pursuit of Mims, FSU found itself on the wrong side of history as the first and only football program to date to receive such strict punishments; offensive coordinator Alex Atkins was suspended for three games, the program was placed on two years of probation, scholarship reduction, the Rising Spear collective and booster Matthew Quigley were dissociated from the program for certain periods. FSU asked the NCAA to rescind some of these penalties last May. The NCAA has removed several penalties associated with the violation, including the dissociation penalties for Quigley (most of the severe recruiting-related penalties already were served by FSU) and acknowledged this April that the penalties on NIL-related compensation were no longer considered impermissible and were thus struck.

And as FSU fans well-versed in the frenzy that was the Mims recruitment…the Seminoles did not even land Mims as the skilled big man returned to Georgia for one final season before going pro.

We now know what that whirlwind ended up leading to in terms of the NCAA violation.

At the time, it was recruiting chaos at its finest. The Mims ‘arrival at a Tallahassee hotel as FSU got the first visit over Miami and UCF received the – as Cooper Petagna put it –  “LeBron James treatment” in terms of coverage. There was a stakeout of his arrival by Noles247, a report elsewhere of a commitment, a rare public denial of that commitment from the player himself, and ultimately an abrupt ending as Mims returned home. Behind the scenes, it was even more unique with cheating and tragedy at the center of these few days. 

Much of what occurred, publicly and privately, has been reported on to some extent or another over the last few years.

But in a FOIA request that was submitted by Noles247 in January of 2024, resubmitted about a year later after a submission mishap, and fulfilled by FSU in May, we’ve received a unique perspective into the recruitment: 80+ pages of transcripts from Alex Atkins’ two interviews with the NCAA.

In the interviews, conducted in late November of 2022 and again – this time with personal legal counsel representing Atkins – in February of 2023, Atkins discussed some never-before public details of the recruitment. 

In addition to seeing how the NCAA interviews went, the story below sheds light on some of the antics that went on as the Portal Era started to heat up. And not just from FSU’s end. On financial figures that were being thrown around at a time by various in-state schools when this stuff was supposed to be cloak and dagger, a call from Kirby Smart , and how an untimely tragedy changed this recruitment…