AIR FORCE ACADEMY — The Colorado sun beat down on the 4,000-or-so Air Force cadets who marched into Falcon Stadium Saturday. Some left with a “V” sunburned into their foreheads, courtesy the flight cap that comes with the uniform.

So much comes with the uniform.

Three F-16 fighter jets ripped across the sky in the flyover. It’s a football scene that must be seen and felt by every Coloradan. But the moment that shook Falcon Stadium arrived a moment later, when a parachutist dropped in waving the red flag of the U.S. Marine Corps.

If in that moment the Air Force parents, family and friends forgot football and drifted back to the tragedy from Aug. 26 at an airport in Afghanistan, I can’t blame them. There were 13 U.S. service members killed that day, 10 of them Marines, and their average age was 22. The average age of the Air Force players who opened their football season was 20, maybe 21.

And they deserve better than what we’ve seen lately from the unaccountable people in charge.

Air Force beat Lafayette 35-14 in the football game. The Falcons are good again, no surprise.

Outside the winners’ locker room, chants of “Coach (Troy) Cal-houn! Coach Cal-houn” echoed through a tunnel. I asked, what’s the occasion?

“He’s just a great coach. He knows the character he wants all of us to be,” fullback Brad Roberts told me. “He’s just a guy you want to look up to. That’s why we were all chanting his name.”

This is just football; Afghanistan was real life and death. No one here’s making silly comparisons between the two. But right now it’s difficult to envision anyone in uniform chanting the names of the professional politicians and senior military officials who pointed blame elsewhere and avoided taking questions after the embarrassing and deadly way the United States left a 20-year war. One father told media leaders “turned their backs” on the Marines who were killed. A former Marine said on CNN, “It is a stain on our nation’s integrity and honor …” The New York Times called the disaster “humiliating.”

“I blame my own military leaders,” one heartbroken dad told The Daily Beast.

That’s not good enough for the impressive cadets I got to see Saturday. Not even close.

Saturday was the first Air Force game fully open to fans since 2019, and the patriotism on display struck a meaningful tone. So did the realization there is more accountability in Air Force football than there is at the top reaches of the military who bloviate nightly on cable news.

A man named Stuart Scheller, a U.S. Marine Lt. Col., sacrificed 17 years of service when he was relieved of duty for calling out the cowards in charge: “Potentially all those people did die in vain if we don’t have senior leaders that own up and raise their hand and say, ‘We did not do this well in the end.’”

That’s not political. That’s principled. And there’s something wrong when the bravest guy in the room is the one without a job.

“They only have the power because we allow it,” Scheller said in a video online. “What if we all demanded accountability?”

Good plan.

As far as I’ve read, not a single senior military official has been fired or stepped down since the Afghanistan debacle. Not one. Compare that M.O. to a game, Air Force football, which last year booted star quarterback D.J. Hammond as a cadet no longer in good standing. They don’t boot star quarterbacks off the team at programs where winning games ranks as the top priority.

Winning games isn’t a top priority at Air Force, even though they do it a lot. Accountability is.

What I’m saying is there should never be a case where a football program is more accountable than the highly paid politicians and officials who didn’t lose a damn thing two weeks ago.

Air Force football next plays at Navy — on 9/11.

“I was about a year (old)” on Sept. 11, 2001, Falcons quarterback Haaziq Daniels said.

“I was seven months,” Roberts said.

If the people in charge turn a 9/11 game into a photo opportunity, a lot of hurting people are going to feel sick to their stomachs. I met a few in the Air Force tailgate lots. But nobody should be surprised the people now in charge don’t want to defend this country. They spent the past five years telling the world how terrible it is. The surprise would be if they wanted to preserve it.

Yeah, we’re not done here.

Those failures go all the way to the top. If your grandfather stumbles through a sentence like this president you take his car keys away. There’s no way an honest person can watch President Teleprompter lose his train of thought and come away with, “Hey, that guy should be commander-in-chief in charge of the next grads from Navy and Air Force!” There’s no way.

Sorry, I’m not over the tragedy of Aug. 26, the past two weeks and what’s to come. Not after spending Saturday at the academy. The only Americans who lost something were the friends and family who lost their favorite people. The Air Force star quarterback was no longer in good standing but the guys in charge of a real-life catastrophe still are?

Shoot, the final PA announcement at Falcon Stadium was this: “Attention cadets: Please report to your accountability stations.” A bunch of the cadets who marched off sooner or later will be sent to dangerous places, and it would be nice to have competent and accountable leadership when they get there. They deserve better than whatever that was in Afghanistan.