While many college students used Spring Break as a chance to go visit exotic locations and just get away for a couple of days, I spent the break in a small town with some of my best friends, watching a lot of college basketball.The March Madness tournament is the greatest sporting event of its kind, giving 65 teams the chance to become this year’s national champion.

The only part of this grand event that needs some improvement are the commercials that run during the games.

Many of the commercials that air during regular programming are leftovers from the Super Bowl, including my favorite Bud Light commercial with “rock, paper, scissors” being played, but others are just horrendous.

The worst of the commercials are the ones for brands consumers see every day, but these commercials have had a basketball spin put on them to accommodate for the tournament.

The most ridiculous of these commercials was by far the one for Esurance.com. The commercial has Erin Esurance playing basketball against three robots. Her coach, who looks like Tom Selleck with his shirt partially unbuttoned, claims the robots are trying to prevent her from getting cheap auto insurance. He then draws up a “play” called “Quote. Buy. Print.” to help her score, and therefore, get a great rate on auto insurance.

It doesn’t help that I already consider Esurance.com commercials to be among the worst on TV, but making a basketball version for the sole purpose of running during the tournament drove me up a wall.

Speaking of driving, other bad commercials were for various cars. While the convertible commercials were not funny and, frankly, a little difficult to understand, the worst car commercials came from Pontiac.

My least favorite Pontiac commercial was one where a Kansas Jayhawks basketball fan had Texas Tech coach Bob Knight tied up in the back seat of her new Pontiac car on the way to Kansas’ next game.

CBS, the company that televised the tournament, should try and make the tournament have the same effect on commercials as the Super Bowl.

Part of the reason for the lack of interest in developing grand commercials such as the ones used on Super Sunday is because some of the tournament games are played during hours in which people are supposed to be at work or in class.

While the official Nielsen television ratings are not available yet, Zap2it.com reported that CBS won the ratings battle versus FOX, NBC and ABC for Friday because of the boost they received from the basketball tournament. Therefore, people are definitely still watching the games, whether they are skipping work or school or were just lucky enough to have nothing better to do with their time.

There are still many games played during the evening hours and on weekends that anyone can watch, whether they have to work.

That would be the perfect time to debut new and exciting commercials to entice people to purchase products.

These new commercials would be a win/win situation for everyone since the advertising agencies have another market to design advertisements for, and it would keep viewers entertained when every team uses five timeouts in the last three minutes of every game.

Photo editor Billy Wessels is a junior news-editorial journalism major from Waxahachie.