The charade that is the Division I college football season kicked off this weekend. The NCAA, the major conferences and their school administrators took a break from counting their money to celebrate the virtues of a game that keeps rolling in its own filth and somehow convinces itself and millions of fans that it is just the crisp, sweet fragrance of fall that smells.

The pig has new lipstick this year, a recently-approved four-team playoff set to begin in 2014. The BCS is gone, replaced by a system that doubles the number of teams that have a shot at a national title in January but really isn’t any more inclusive than the current format. Arbitrary polls and computers will still have the ultimate say on who can win, not what happens on the field.

But of course the beauty of college football, we are told, is the regular season. Every game matters. Mix in the high stakes with the tradition, passion and pageantry and one can’t help but get swept up in the excitement.

I’ve somehow managed to avoid the broom for 42 years. Yet, still a little buzzed from the excitement of a tense high school opener on Friday night (Winslow hanging on to beat Poland by a point), I awoke Saturday morning to a rare treat — live Saturday morning football.

Since my job keeps me away from the television on Fridays and Saturdays this time of year, I don’t get many chances to watch the college game. So I decided to give Saturday morning’s game a shot over my bowl of corn chex.

And hey, who could ask for a better Saturday morning college football buffet? Two storied programs, Notre Dame and Navy. Yes, both have seen better days, but they still have a historic rivalry and, more importantly, they still have standards. Adding to the appeal was the setting — Dublin, Ireland.

Notre Dame scored a couple of touchdowns early and the game was pretty much over before it was 15 minutes old. But I was willing to suppress my complaint that the overwhelming majority of major college games are so one-sided just once to soak in the uniqueness of college football in such an exotic setting.

And it was going pretty well until I thought of Allen Pinkett.

If you haven’t heard, Notre Dame suspended Pinkett, a former player, from its radio broadcast this week after he suggested the Fighting Irish would benefit from allowing criminals on the team.

It was a bold statement by Pinkett, poorly phrased but with more than a kernel of truth.

But then I was reminded that Notre Dame already has somewhat of a criminal element. And it’s not a player.

Head coach Brian Kelly should have been arrested in 2010 for sending a 20-year-old student, Declan Sullivan, to his death by forcing him to video tape practice from a scissor lift during a wind storm. Immediately, the prospect of having to listen to Kelly tell a CBS sideline reporter at halftime how proud he was of his kids’ effort began to make me nauseous.

But hey, criminally negligent coaches aren’t that common in major college football, right?

At least Navy is clean, so I started to root for the Midshipmen even as they were getting their white hats handed to them. A 25-yard touchdown pass early in the third quarter cut the deficit to 17, but alas, Roger Staubach was not walking through that door. Neither was the USS Missouri, which was about the only thing that could have stopped the Irish from steamrolling them the rest of the way.

God bless our future democracy defenders, but I just can’t subject myself to 11 weeks of rooting for the football equivalent of the Milwaukee Brewers right now.

Hours later, Michigan and Alabama squared off in the season’s first clash of top-10 titans. The loser’s national championship hopes took a turn for the worse two days before Labor Day, unless of course it was Alabama, which will get the NCAA’s special SEC pardon if it hasn’t managed to embarrass itself between now and late November. The winner, meanwhile, probably had some friendly co-eds invite all of the recruits in attendance to a postgame “chem-free” victory party.

Let’s give the NCAA credit, though. At least it doesn’t have to deal with the scourge of concussions like the NFL, right? I mean, these kids are just playing for love of the game. No blood money involved. Let’s keep the tradition alive.