Not to shame anyone's good time or anything, but the best Super Bowl commercials are, for me, the best part of the Super Bowl, period. It's not because I particularly hate football or anything; I don't. Football is fine. Going to football games is really fun: Beer, snacks, huge crowd energy, huddling in the cold together, people collectively experience dramatic emotional shifts en masse around minute actions that have nothing to do with their own actual lives nor the lives of people they know personally... I'm into all of it. But that's when I'm actually at a football game, and being that this is the Super Bowl and I am not an especially rich person (sorry to completely shatter your ideas about the infinite pockets of writers), I'm relegated, like most people, to watching this football game from my own couch.

And that's where football loses me. I'm not someone who routinely follows football, so I have no real allegiance or investment in either team playing. But I do have considerable interest in the entire culture surrounding the Super Bowl: In a world of very big TV events, it's arguably the biggest. And in a world full of well-executed video advertisements, it's where the most prominent brands in the world roll out their highest-budget, most star-studded, most provocative and evocative ads; Seeing the commercials themselves, and following the reverberating conversations they spark is at least as engaging (and frankly, a bit less predictable) than the game itself.

Have I thoroughly alienated every hardcore football fan in the room? Cool! While you're waiting for your blood pressure to return to a level that will allow you to see straight that you might string together hateful words in an email to me, take a moment and check out these ads from Super Bowl 50. These ads that were cooler and more interesting than the game itself. (Kidding not kidding.)