I’m a bit of a football purist.

I watch the Super Bowl not for the pageantry, but for the game. And while I understand that an extra week is needed to create the spectacle that is the Super Bowl, I’m a little burned out on all the conjecture, analysis and whimsy voiced every day of the week before Super Bowl Sunday arrives.

So when FOX announced that they would be airing 27 1/2 hours of pregame coverage, I decided to delay my Super Bowl viewing until as close to the alleged 6:18 PM kickoff as humanly possible. And when I did finally sit down in front of the television at around 6:00 PM, I quickly realized, with much dismay, that kickoff wouldn’t actually occur until 6:30 PM.

Now as great as the game itself was, I watched with much trepidation as the commercials and another overly long and painful halftime show invaded my inner sanctum of pigskin purity. But I must acknowledge that a few commercials were actually quite clever. The much-praised Bud Light commercials, however, have become a caricature of what they once were, now rearing their heads as one-joke, one-note commercials, consisting of a 20-second setup, a 3-second joke, a ‘Drink Bud Light’ insert, then the obligatory 2-second follow-up. Yawn.

So this year, I am only rewarding commercials that I genuinely enjoyed for more than that brief moment of comedy.

The envelope, please…

Bridgestone: Screaming squirrels, screaming wildlife, screaming woman. Good stuff.

Terminator, Sarah Connor Chronicles: Totally unexpected as a Terminator crushes that annoying FOX football robot. ‘I’ll be back.’

Fedex: Carrier pigeons with high-tech homing devices cleverly segue to giant pigeons dropping packages on an unsuspecting public. Brilliant.

Tide: Another surprising commercial. Usually detergent advertisements leave much to be desired, but this one was funny and held my attention the whole time.

Wall-E: I try to ignore movie trailers since they aren’t really your traditional Super Bowl commercial, but Woody and Buzz grabbed me and the rest of the trailer absolutely rocked.

Coke: Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons fighting for a Coke made for the best non-speaking commercial in a long time.

NFL Super Ad: Chester Pitts. What a terrific ad.

And finally, what was Danica Patrick thinking signing up with GoDaddy? How can you do a racy, raunchy commercial when you are trying to be taken seriously in a male-dominated sport? And the banned commercial is so bad, I won’t even show it to you. I mean it’s really, really bad. So whatever you do, don’t click here to watch it.

You clicked, didn’t you.

I told you it was bad.