Most Super Bowls are boring and often lopsided games, but the commercials make them watchable.

In Super Bowl XLVII it was just the opposite with an exciting game ending with a Ravens 34-31 victory over San Francisco.

However, the commercials rolled out by advertisers this year may have been the biggest waste of nearly $4 million per 30-second spot in ad history.

The vast majority lacked any originality and caused a collective yawn. Maybe the fact that many advertisers had posted their ads on-line a week earlier eliminated any surprise when they actually ran during the game.

Probably the best effort was by Budweiser, which rolled out the tried and true formula of using its iconic Clydesdales. This one (below) involved a guy raising a baby Clydesdale horse and then being reunited with it years later after a parade.

However, foreign-owned Anheuser-Busch rolled out a series of other ads for Budweiser and its other brands that simply missed the mark.

Finishing second was likely Volkswagen, with its commercial of a guy at work acting like a Jamaican. It was criticized early in the week by a few people who were looking to be offended, but overall it was a good effort. At least it was funny to anyone who has ever worked in a corporation.

Possibly finishing third was the rollout of the old e-Trade baby. It wasn’t that original or funny, but the competition was extremely thin this year.

Dodge had a good commercial playing a segment by former radio icon Paul Harvey talking about farmers, but it seemed to go on forever, and viewers only learned it was a Dodge Ram spot for about two seconds at the end. It was not millions of dollars well spent.

A Tide commercial featuring a stain that looked like Joe Montana in any other year would have been considered average.

The Go Daddy commercial of a chubby pasty-faced nerd tonguing a super model may have caused some vomiting at Super Bowl parties. It certainly was not the kind of thing a family with young children would appreciate.

A bunch of guys dressed in drag eating Doritos was just stupid. Amy Poehler was somewhat cute for Best Buy, but the retailer should continue its plans to close down hundreds of stores this year. The cute ad will not turn things around.

Unfortunately, Kansas Citians were not exposed the Church of Scientology’s weird commercial (below) that ran in major markets such as New York and LA. The church is trying to offset negative publicity it has been receiving lately via a book that has come out by a Pulitzer prize-winning author. The ad probably won’t change that very much.