Report: Louisville to Discuss Restoring 2013 MBB Title with NCAA

Could the Louisville men's basketball program's 2013 national championship actually get restored some day? It seems that UofL it starting mount a case that it should.

According to The Courier-Journal's Payton Titus, the University of Louisville Athletic Association is "looking to engage in conversation with the NCAA" regarding restoring the Cardinals' third national title back on official record.

Back in 2017, UofL's 2013 national championship - their third in program history - was vacated by the NCAA in the wake of the Andre McGee and Katina Powell sex scandal that occurred under former head coach Rick Pitino. This led to the vacation of not only the 2013 title, but their 2012 Final Four appearance and 123 total wins from 2010 to 2014.

Since then, Louisville fans have been clamoring to restore the championship banner, and these cries have only gotten louder in recent years. Earlier this month, this topic of debate reached a flash point.

On Aug. 15, the NCAA handed down the penalties from Michigan football's infamous sign stealing scandal. While the Wolverines were hit with unprecedented fines (that could reach over $20 million), and both former head coach Jim Harbaugh and scandal mastermind Conner Stalions got lengthy show-cause penalties, UM was not stripped of their 2023 national championship.

It's the latest in a long line of penalties handed down by the NCAA that suggest that Louisville got the short end of the stick - and this was the straw that finally broke the camel's back.

"The situation, everything surrounding the NCAA, the landscape in college sports is drastically different," UofL athletic director Josh Heird told the Courier-Journal. "The recent punishments that were handed down to Michigan (football). There's just a number of things that we can point at, I think, for us to be able to say, 'Hey, look, we need to engage in a conversation here about having the opportunity to have this banner up.'"

In 2023, a placeholder banner that reads "2013 Final Coaches Poll #1." was lifted and placed in the rafters where the 2023 championship banner once resided. However, getting the actual banner back and restoring the record still remained a point of emphasis for Heird.

"Those are conversations I need to have with the NCAA. This isn't just as simple as rolling down to the arena tonight," Heird said back in 2022. "In all seriousness, 2013 was an extremely, extremely important year to this program. I think everybody knows what happened during March and the first week of April in 2013.

"While that's never going to be taken away from our fans, from our student athletes that played in that game, to recognize them is important to me. If there's an avenue to get that done, that's what we're going to try to do."

It seems that Heird is going to get some political backing on this subject as well. Last week, Louisville mayor Craig Greenberg said that he is "going to work with University of Louisville to try and get its 2013 National Championship banner" back.

Considering that Louisville is the only men's basketball program to ever have a championship stripped, there is no precedent set on how exactly to get the title back. However, it doesn't seem like that's stopping Heird and ULAA from at least making an effort to do so.