Color me a bit biased because I have refereed a bunch of basketball games with him, but I think Ron Hasquet is as good as it gets as a color commentator for a football game.

Hasquet is Paul Panisko’s sidekick on “Digger Vision,” the YouTube broadcasts of the Montana Tech football games. As a former player and a coach, Hasquet gives his audience an inside look at what is going on in each play.

Panisko is a real pro as a play-by-play announcer. He can make it so the fans of both sides enjoy the broadcast. Even though he is rooting for the Orediggers inside, he is almost always right down the middle.

That is an art.

As the colorman, Hasquet is a bit of an artist, too. He teaches us about football as he gives us a behind-the-curtain look at what goes into the play calls. He also gives us insight about the players executing those plays from a perspective that is only possible because of his experience on the field and on the sideline.

The best thing Hasquet does, though, is he never makes it about himself. Hasquet does not trip over himself to make incredibly dumb comments like most of the professionals that we see on our television.

Sure, we all say dumb things from time to time. I definitely say and write my share of silly comments.

Football color commentators, though, set the bar for such inane talk. Thanks to guys like Chris Collinsworth and Tony Romo, every football fan in the world is intimately familiar the mute button on their remote control.

It started with John Madden, the first of the modern color commentators. The former Oakland Raiders coach is the best colorman of all time. He could explain the game and make us laugh at the same time, offering an array of funny analogies and sound effects.

He made the game interesting even for people who do not know much about football.

Over time, though, Madden became a bit of a caricature of himself, and the next generations of announcers tried to follow suit. They seem to figure that the game needs a character as its colorman.

Instead of copying Madden of 1984, they copy the version from 2001.

While Collinsworth can — and usually does — completely ruin a game, Romo gets the edge in the annoyance factor. He is so exasperating that he makes Tom Brady seem like a pretty good color commentator.

That is mainly because of Romo’s “if you’re” comments. “This is a big play if you’re a Broncos fan, Jim.” “If you’re a Raiders fan, Jim, you’ve got to be nervous.”

He says something along those lines every 30 or 40 seconds of the 3-hour broadcast. For some reason, just about every other announce in the world has tried to copy that.

Now we hear things like, “This is a big decision if you’re Andy Reid.” Or, “If you’re Caleb Williams, you’ve got to make a better decision than that.”

Well, we are not Andy Reid or Caleb Williams, so why do they have to talk like that? It would be so much easier to say, “This is a big decision for Andy Reid,” or “Caleb Williams has to make better decisions.”

When you add words to sound smarter than you are, you only prove the opposite.

Romo, though, is a likable guy, even if he annoys the heck out of us. You cannot say the same about Collinsworth, who slobbers over the top players in a way that would makes us forget about Madden’s man crush on Brett Favre.

Collinsworth has the likability of an eczema rash. The only thing more aggravating than everything he says is the fake-sounding voice in which he says it.

During the University of Montana’s playoff game against South Dakota State on Dec. 6, though, I heard a comment that just might top them all on the absurd scale. Jeff Woody, the ESPN+ colorman on the game, was blown away by the noise of Washington-Grizzly Stadium.

The stadium was insanely noisy that game, even though about 7,000 Griz fans showed up disguised as empty seats, as Chris Berman would say.

It is, after all, a stadium that Romo said was the loudest he ever experienced when he was a player. It leads to a handful of false starts by the opposing offense each game. Woody, who was otherwise pretty good, explained to the audience that the stadium is so loud because of the surrounding mountains.

The sound of the crowd, Woody said, hits the granite and bounces back into the offensive lineman’s ears, making it impossible to hear the quarterback.

Clearly, Woody is not a scientist.

But you do not have to be Neil deGrasse Tyson to know that Woody’s comment was wacko. I’m sure he was getting an eye roll from his play-by-play partner Richard Cross as he uttered those words. The camera man who then panned to the mountains was probably laughing in disbelief, too.

Yes, the stadium is beautifully nestled at the base of Hellgate Canyon and just a hop, skip and jump from the foot of Mount Sentinel. It is almost as beautiful as Montana Tech’s Alumni Coliseum, which sits at the bottom of Big Butte.

I’m not a scientist, either, but I suspect that there might be some sound that hits the mountain and bounces back toward the field.

That mountainous location, though, is not why Washington-Grizzly Stadium rivals Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City and Lumen Field in Seattle in decibel levels. Those venues, by the way, are not near a mountain.

Washington-Grizzly Stadium is loud for several factors, and Mount Sentinel is not one of them. Neither is neighboring Mount Jumbo.

Washington-Grizzly Stadium features a sunken field surrounded by tons of concrete built up to form a giant bowl. During a game, it usually has about 25,000 fans screaming at the top of their lungs, and those screams are coming from all directions.

That combination of acoustics and all those feverish fans makes up the perfect cocktail of disruption and intimidation of Grizzly opponents. The mountains are not a part of that recipe.

More than a week later, and I am still trying to come to terms with how someone could even think the mountains were the main reason the stadium is so loud. It is hard to even fathom.

Other than that comment, Woody did a very good job calling the game. While he lacks smarts when it comes to physics, he is very knowledgeable about the game of football. He also clearly did his homework on the matchup. He was not as good as Hasquet, but he was also light years better than Collinsworth and Romo.

In the mountains or in the prairies, I would take Woody over just about every NFL or major college football color commentator any day of the week. But I would take Hasquet over them all.

I could sit and listen to him tell us the intricate details of a football game every day. When the game is over, I always feel like I’ve learned something more about the sport I have been passionate about my entire life.

Of course, I will take that all back if Hasquet ever blames a false start on the crowd noise bouncing back from Big Butte.

— Bill Foley, was lucky to get a C in science class, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.