Once upon a time, the Super Bowl was about football. Now it is about the festivities, the halftime show and, of course, the commercials. I was not able to be in Jacksonville to rub elbows with all the celebrities that randomly decide to show up at the Super Bowl, but at least I got to see all the commercials.

For $2.4 million per 30-second spot, the commercials have got to be good. Right? Companies have to do something to get this mass audience to continue watching when there is no football on the screen and no one is getting hurt.

The Super Bowl attracts more viewers than any other television broadcast during the year. More women even watch the Super Bowl than any other program, including Oprah. Amazing, eh?

The local Fox station brought in the prime-time anchors for news breaks during the pre-game show. With so many people gathering around a television and nothing else to do during the day, it should be the one Sunday you can buy real beer during the year.

Among all these observations, it was the commercials that brought me the most amount of displeasure. While we were treated to some humorous commercials, the majority were sub-par. The Super Bowl has also become a day for companies to release new commercials, but fans got to watch old talking baby Quizno’s commercials and Moore wants more Qwest commercials.

I’m guessing some people were angry with the farting clydesdale in Anheuser-Busch commercials or the numerous Lavitra commercials where an old man is only able to throw the football through the tire after taking Lavitra. This year companies severly toned down their humor.

Anheuser-Busch, as usual, took the cake for best commercials. They even paid enough so no other beer company could air a commercial during the Super Bowl. Ironic considering that Coors, the official beer of the NFL, could not even air a commercial if it wanted. The careerbuilder.com commercials were funny.

They were the ones where the guy is working with monkeys and wanting a new job. But their ads were nothing compared to the Budweiser one where the pilot jumps out of the plane after a six-pack, leaving the guys who are learning to jump staring at each other.

But the best Budweiser commercial was the one where two friends take a picture of themselves at the game and send it to their friend sitting on a couch watching the game.

The friend then sends them three pictures; one of himself, one of a Budweiser bottle and one of the other guy’s girlfriend. Needless to say, I watched many of the other commercials just waiting for the next Budweiser one.

The other exception to the lackluster commercials were the AmeriQuest Mortgage Company ones. I think they were good mostly because they had nothing to do with the company, but managed to be funny. It was only about a week after the game when I saw one of these commericials again and realized what company they were advertising for.

The rest of the companies and ad agengies should use this opportunity and mass audience to release a new commercial.

It is not just the commercials that seemed toned down, but after last year’s costume malfunction, the halftime show even seemed lame.

The producers managed to find a man who hasn’t had sex appeal since Johnson was president and didn’t even put a woman on stage. Paul McCartney jumped around a bit, but that was the extent of the dancing. For the only sport more American to watch than Nascar, the Super Bowl bigwigs got a Brit to perform…oldies.

Luckily the football was exciting enough, in the second half anyway, to make people forget most of the commercials. The only problem is that when the commercials ended we were back to hearing useless comments from Joe Buck, Cris Collinsworth and Troy Aikman.