Former Louisville players slam NCAA for stripping 2013 title

The NCAA may now view Louisville's 2013 national championship as illegitimate, but the players who suited up for the team may have something else to say.

Kevin Ware, who infamously suffered a gruesome leg injury during the Cardinals' Final Four run that year, added "it's dumb," to ESPN's Jeff Goodman.

"At the end of the day, the mistakes that Andre McGee made didn't have to do with us," he said. "The NCAA is a joke."

McGee, Louisville's former director of basketball operations, was found by the NCAA to have acted unethically for arranging parties involving sex acts with strippers for Cardinals players and recruits between 2010-14. Ware maintains he knew nothing about the antics.

"None of that stuff was going on in 2013," Ware said.

The Cardinals won the championship with an 82-76 victory over Michigan on April 8, 2013. Under NCAA rules, Michigan will not be named a replacement champion. In addition to its national title, 122 other Louisville men's basketball victories between 2011-15 were vacated.

Luke Hancock, a former Louisville forward and 2013 Final Four Most Outstanding Player, added, "We won those games. It's not like that never happened."

The storied Cardinals program has been rocked to its core by scandal over the last few years. In October, Hall of Fame coach Rick Pitino was fired in the wake of the FBI's NCAA corruption investigation.

Louisville becomes the first NCAA men's basketball Division I team ever to have a national championship vacated. USC previously had its 2004 BCS football title stripped.