After next season it might not just be Jacksonville Jaguars fans who won’t be able to watch their team play every Sunday, if labor talks between the NFL Players Association and the owners continue to move down the same path they’re on now.

A lockout of the players by the owners before the 2011 season is beginning to seem a virtual inevitability; as Peter King, who is reliable when the topic at hand isn’t Brett Favre and is more in touch with the administrations of the 32- member clubs than probably any other columnist, wrote in his recent Monday Morning Quarterback piece for Sports Illustrated, it will be an “upset” if play begins as scheduled in September 2011.

For fans, this seems like a travesty. For all the ancillary personnel whose livelihoods revolve around the game — stadium and team employees, media analysts and bookies — the consequences of a lockout would be catastrophic. However, there’s one group who stand to benefit from a lockout and should be rooting — praying — for the possibility: the players.

The owners have already drawn their line in the sand; they will either force the players to accept the status quo stands, or the league goes black. Giants co-owner John Mara, son of beloved former owner Wellington Mara, bluntly expressed this last Monday, telling the New York Times’ Judy Battista that “I don’t think we’ve received a meaningful counterproposal.”

The point that we try to make to them is that the costs and risks are much greater than they ever have been. Especially in this economy. I don’t think there has been enough of a recognition on their part of that concept. ... They want a deal that is equal to or better than the existing one, and that is not acceptable to us.”

But for the players, the status quo is unacceptable. Football players, unlike their peers in baseball, hockey or basketball, only have an average window of about two to three years in which they can earn real money doing what they’re best at.

Only a startling 7 percent of players are in the league for more than a decade. Running backs and most receivers have run out of gas by age 30, while linemen — who absorb contact on every play — the average length of tenure is below four seasons. Then consider that, by the time an NFL career grinds to a halt, most athletes are worn-down husks of the men they once were, and further athletic pursuits are pretty much unthinkable.

The scars endured by many former football players, even stars, are tragic. Dementia is scarily common for former NFLers, with the rate of memory loss disorders for former players looming at 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49.

It may have been melodramatic, but former Tampa Bay Buccaneers lineman Dave Pear’s declaration that “the NFL destroys families” is far from far off. He would know: his career ended a decade before free agency came to the sport, and his medical bills come to about $1,000 per month. If that sounds absurdly expensive, consider that Pear takes 38 pills a day to combat the massive brain trauma he suffered during his five-year career.

So does it make any sense that football is the only one of the major sports that does not guarantee players’ contracts? In a league that spits out players as fast as they come out of college (in 2008, it was discovered that only 39 percent of players enrolled at the 2004 combine were still active), most can scarcely scrape out a reasonable living by the time it comes time to pay their extensive doctors bills.

Beyond not providing their employees with guaranteed contracts, the NFL also offers the worst retirement benefits of any sport, with most coming away with less than $2,000 a month. Remember the not-uncommon medical bills of Dave Pear, and then consider how many other employment options faded athletes have available to them, and that will provide some idea as to how useful the policy is for ex-players who can barely walk.

Then there’s also the fact that the NFL more strictly polices player apparel than any other American sports league; because of the authority the NFL has over what players wear on the field and even during post-game press conferences, high-profile football players have fewer opportunities than other star athletes to market themselves on a significant level.

Now is the players’ best opportunity to demand guaranteed contracts and legitimate pensions. Following multiple high-profile reports on the devastation concussions wreak on the human brain, including a recent front-page New York Times story focusing on former NFL players, the public is more understanding of the players’ position than they ever have been and likely ever will.

True, it will be hard for most players to absorb the loss of salary a lockout would represent. But unlike previous potential strike years, the potential option of the startup USFL at least provides a chance for some to pull in a paycheck during the impasse. The NFLPA understands that the only way they can wrest any meaningful concessions out of the tight-fisted league will be to force the owners to consider having to delay or call off a season; the fans should, instead of dreading the prospect, applaud the players of the sport they love for doing everything within the power to ensure that they can keep playing.

— Contact Asher Smith.