Michigan coach John Beilein won't claim Louisville's vacated 2013 national championship

Michigan did not beat Louisville for the 2013 men's basketball national championship.

And though the NCAA will indeed force the Cardinals to vacate that championship win, Michigan coach John Beilein is not about to claim it for his own program.

Instead, he maintains fond memories of what he'll remember as one of the best groups to ever do it in Ann Arbor.

"We didn't win it all. We lost to a great team. If someone else wants to come and say 'hey, you won it all, you're the champion.' We'll take it," Beilein said Tuesday. "But I'm not going to declare that. I'm declaring that we played our tail off that entire year and got every bit out of what was, remember, a really young team. Freshmen and sophomores all over the place.

"That was a great basketball team."

Earlier Tuesday, the NCAA's Infractions Appeals Committee announced its decision to uphold the Committee on Infractions' ruling that Louisville will vacate more than 100 victories, including the 2013 national championship, due to violations stemming from a scandal involving players and escorts.

The NCAA determined a Louisville staffer paid an escort service thousands of dollars for stripteases and sex acts for recruits and players.

The 2013 Louisville squad beat Michigan, 82-76, in Atlanta for the national championship that April, ending one of the Wolverines' most storied seasons one game short of the title.

That game was remembered for reserve freshman point guard Spike Albrecht's 17-point first-half outburst to push Michigan in front early, Louisville forward Luke Hancock's scoring explosion to bring the Cardinals back and a controversial foul call on a Trey Burke's block attempt of Peyton Siva late in the second half.

That Michigan team featured six NBA Draft picks (Trey Burke, Tim Hardaway Jr., Nik Stauskas, Mitch McGary, Glenn Robinson III and Caris LeVert) and the consensus national player of the year (Burke).

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Michigan went 31-8 that season, relying heavily on an eventual starting five of Burke, Hardaway, Stauskas, Robinson and McGary — one sophomore, one junior and three freshmen — on an NCAA Tournament ride that saw Michigan take a No. 4 seed and advance to the national final.

That group finished one game short. And despite Louisville's vacated title, it'll remain one game short as the NCAA does not retroactively award vacated championships to teams that lost.

Still, Beilein says he'll remember that group as one of the greats.

"One of the reasons I coach is to (see) if you can go through a year as a staff and get everything out of our team. That's the ultimate goal," Beilein said. "If you win the championship, OK, we got everything we could out of them and we did everything the right way. I don't know enough about the (Louisville) situation.

"All I know is that we can look ourselves in the mirror and say 'we did everything we could that year.'"

Contact Nick Baumgardner: nbaumgardn@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @nickbaumgardner.

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