Dads Are All The Rage In This Year's Superbowl Ads

This year’s Super Bowl commercials are all about dads and their daughters.

The Super Bowl is coming up this weekend, and it looks like it will be worth tuning into even if just for the commercials. And this year’s commercials are all about the dads. A lot of guys watching at home Saturday have kids of their own, and advertisers like Hyundai are hoping those guys will be able to relate to the panic of comedian Kevin Hart, who watches his teenage daughter go off on her first date and realizes that the “Car Finder” function in his Hyundai Genesis will allow him to stalk the young couple and make sure his daughter is safe.

And in a just as funny but much more heartwarming take on the daddy/daughter relationship, Pantene got some star football players together with their daughters to make some YouTube hair tutorials, and the results are precious.

Pantene wants to encourage the fathers of the world to pick up a brush–and a bottle of hair product, because they are a hair product company, of course–and take on hair-styling duties, and that’s great advice. Hair styling time is good quality time, and a number of fathers are afraid of the prospect of styling their little girls’ hair. Sure, pigtails are not rocket science, and the Internet is full of helpful videos and hair tutorials, but if you’ve never had long hair and never played with dolls, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t even know how to brush long hair, let alone braid it or twist it up into a bun. A lot of people would toss up their hands and run, but after watching these cute videos of football players styling their daughters’ hair, hopefully some of those guys will decide to give hair styling a try. It’s fun, and it’s adorable.

“The only style that I’m able to do is a ponytail,” says Pittsburgh Steelers running back DeAngelo Williams, who tries his hand at a pair of twisted pigtails while his adorable kindergarten daughter Rhiya looks on from the chair with an expression of extreme skepticism. The video is super cute as Williams stumbles his way through the process, but he pulls it off. My personal favorite moment is right after he’s finished the first pigtail and he’s feeling really good about the accomplishment.

“Oh yeah, I’m good,” he says. He’s grinning ear to ear. He’s feeling like a champion. He’s ready to get started on the second pigtail, then Rhiya turns to him with a little blue bow in her hand.

“Daddy, could you put the bow inside the braid?” she asks, and Williams freezes with the stunned expression of someone who has gone to mail a letter and been asked to re-take the SATs.

“I didn’t know she was going to hit me with this,” he said. “She changed the game plan on me.”

He pulls off the twisted pigtails with aplomb, though, and Rhiya looks really happy.

“Girls who spend quality time with their dads grow up to be stronger women,” Pantene asserts, and hair-styling certainly counts as quality time.

“If you’re a father and you only have so many hours in the day, maybe doing their hair is something you can do to connect with them and build that relationship,” says Benjamin Watson of the New Orleans Saints as he gives his daughter, Grace, a pair of braided pigtails in another Pantene video. Quality time with dad is important to help girls grow up to be strong, confident women. But hopefully the dads will learn to let go before they’re chasing their daughters on dates like Kevin Hart in his Hyundai ad.