I keep telling myself that I'm not going to watch the Super Bowl this year -- and not just because the BrownDawgs managed to find a new and fun way to avoid playing in the annual NFL championship game.

See, it really isn't just a game any more. It's become a spectacle, so overblown and out of proportion that in many ways, it's laughable.

Pick up a newspaper and flip it open to the sports section. For two weeks now, we've been inundated with information about Joe Gibbs' personal life and comparisons of John Elway to John Wayne. Players and coachs on both sides have spent numerous hours explaining to avid interviewers just why they refuse to be distracted by interviews.

Reporters who may never have seen an NFL game before, much less ever have heard of important Americans like Rich Karlis and Ali Haji-Sheikh, search endless for new story angles.

Ah, here's one!

Doug Williams, the Washington quarterback, is black!

A HISTORIC MOMENT!

No, I'm sorry. The many "firsts" accomplished by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were "historic." That Jesse Jackson could soon be president has historic implications.

That the guy taking snaps for the NFC representative in Super Bowl XXII is black will do nothing for the abhorrent conditions of apartheid in South Africa, or any other truly important world issue. It's just a game.

if Washington's #17 outplays Denver's #7 (as Dawgs everywhere pray will be the case), many people will self-righteously proclaim it a sort of victory toward racial equality. But symbolic victories like this one could and will do virtually nothing in the larger scope of the "real world." Just ask Jimmy the Greek.

At one of the infinitude of press conferences during Hype Week in San Diego last week, one reporter -- yes, he was white -- actually had the audacity to ask Williams if it had occurred to him that he was a black quarterback headed to the Super Bowl.

Williams' quick-witted response was "Has it occurred to me? That's kind of easy. I get up every morning and watch my face in the mirror."

Probably many of the other reporters present thought that answer to be irreverent and rude. And well it should have been -- consider the inherent rudeness of asking an intelligent graduate of Grambling University a question like that, wasting his time on belaboring the obvious in search of a "great story."

Please, ask him how he's going to handle Karl Mecklenburg and Rulon Jones, or ask him if Elway is as good as everyone thinks; ask him what he had for breakfast at the training table, if you want, but limit the questions to the world of football. This is, after all, a football game.

But somehow, people insist on making it more than that.

A group in Minneapolis is raising a legal ruckus claiming that the name "Redskins" is racist in nature. While I'm sure it's simply coincidence that the city that this home to this protest is also home to the team that Washington knocked off in the NFC Championship game, this is assuredly an Important Symbolic Protest.

Perhaps somebody should point out to these Gopher State vigilantes that their beloved Vikings employ three quarterbacks, all of whom are white -- and that it's Doug Williams, of the Washington Racist-Skins who is making the Positive Symbolic Statement this Sunday.

Or maybe, just maybe -- before we progress from the ridiculous to the sublime -- we can forget the whole goofy symbolic thing.

Forget symbolism -- take a look at the facts. Doug Williams, hounded his entire career by the tag "good black quarterback," has started for parts of six seasons in the NFL. He's taken four teams to the playoffs, two to a conference championship game, and now one to the Super Bowl. Those are numbers an elite group named Kelly, Fouts and Kosar would be thrilled to have.

Those are numbers that, in my book, make Doug Williams a "good quarterback." And maybe with a win this Sunday, the rest of the world, especially the media, will realize that -- symbolism aside -- that one adjective is all that really matters.