Louisville basketball will vacate 2013 men’s title as NCAA upholds ruling
The Louisville men’s basketball program will vacate its 2013 national championship and 2012 Final Four appearance after the NCAA on Tuesday upheld sanctions issued in the wake of a sex scandal.
Louisville becomes the first program in modern NCAA history to vacate a national championship.
The program was also stripped of 123 wins from 2012 to 2015 after an NCAA investigation found that a member of the coaching staff had provided prostitutes and strippers to players and recruits. Louisville also must pay the NCAA roughly $600,000 in fines, interim university president Greg Postel said at a news conference Tuesday, stemming from revenue the school earned by NCAA tournament appearances from 2012 to 2015.
Postel expressed disappointment with the punishment, which marks the latest turbulence for an athletic program that has been immersed in high-profile scandals for much of the past three years.
“I cannot say this strongly enough: We believe the NCAA is simply wrong,” Postel said.
The decision is unrelated to an ongoing FBI corruption probe of college basketball programs, including Louisville, that led to the firing of coach Rick Pitino and athletic director Tom Jurich in October.
The failed appeal of the punishments, which were first announced by the NCAA Committee on Infractions in June, is the final step in an NCAA adjudication process that began in October 2015. The scandal was first aired in a book, Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen, by former escort Katrina Powell, who alleged that Andre McGee, a Cardinals assistant coach at the time, paid her $10,000 to provide strippers for dorm parties between 2010 and 2014.