Animation issues from maya to unity

Good day:

I've been having a hard time trying to determine where the issue is occurring. I must be something I've done, but for the life of me I can't figure out what it is. When I load mecanim animations on to my Maya rigged humanoid character the animation moves the character almost a full body length straight up before playing. The translation occurs as soon as I hit play on my test scene. so I know it has to have something to do with the character reference, I'm just not able to determine how to fix it. Attached are screen shots of starting position, and the location that the animation actually plays. I know this has to be something stupid easy, and I'm sorry to have to ask all of you something so basic, but any assistance would really help. I'm getting pretty frustrated with this issue.

please note, the white bar at the bottom of the screenshots is a stationary cube without texture. it's functioning as the ground. NOt a very good reference point, sorry for that.

So After some further consideration I went back into Maya and ensured that the model was at 0 on the y axis. Amazingly this fixed my issue... I can't believe it took me that long to figure out, but lesson learned.