why is the animator controller ignoring transitions?

trying to follow and replicate the mecanim robot tutorial and everything breaks when adding the jump transition. first off, unity decides to save everything even when i am not choosing or save or saying no on exit, so all my files are apparantly messed up because they were overwritten during this tutorial. aside from that, adding the jump animation breaks animator. before adding a transtion, the preview works fine. guy runs, jumps, flips, and lands, etc. but as soon as i make a transition, he starts running, then turns into a bicycle-like pose and falls halfway thru the ground. i have deleted the state, reapplied it, exited unity and redone it all, even chosen different clips, but it breaks into that bike pose everytime. see attached in lower right corner. that pose is NOT part of the animation clip.

this seems to have been a hard to track bug causing the animation clip to lose its status as a humanoid rig and revert to generic, causing the “bike” pose