The National Football League and football franchise owners are bent on establishing an 18-game NFL regular season schedule to generate increased revenue league-wide—a.k.a. Jerry Jones and his fat-cat peers want more scratch. But at what cost to the players themselves?

With the bell tolling on the league’s existing collective bargaining agreement in March, franchise owners have publicly threatened to jeopardize the 2011 season if the players union doesn’t acquiesce to their demands, including the “enhanced schedule.”

The proposed format would slash two preseason games but expand the current 16-game regular season gauntlet to 18 games. The NFL’s owners have their fingers on the self-destruct button, putting pressure on the players to consent to added physical punishment.

The NFL players union is staunchly against an expanded schedule, and scores of current NFL players have voiced their opposition, citing the excessive physical toll it would inflict: “No player wants to play 18 games,” Pittsburgh Steelers receiver Hines Ward said in an interview with CBSSports.com. “You’re not thinking about the players’ safety if you’re trying to add two more games.”

The league and the owners’ unconscionable, soulless drive to bulk up with more grudge-matches where towering, muscle-bound specimens splat into each-other at breakneck speeds contradicts the spirit of commissioner Roger Goodell’s 2010 crackdown on helmet-to-helmet hits, which theoretically demonstrated the league’s concern for player safety. The NFL has revealed its true colors–green, green and green, and I don’t mean “Green” Bay.

The 14-game regular season schedule of old (1961-77) spit-out, a generation of gridiron gladiators who have reported chronic, debilitating pain, has also been proven to suffer from dementia at much higher rates than the general population. The reported maladies of the NFL’s old-timers, combined with the epidemic of prescription painkiller abuse among contemporary players, should signal to outsiders that 16-games—let alone 18—is too much to bear for the players America loves to watch.

A recent Associated Press Knowledge Networks Poll revealed that 45 percent of NFL fans favor the addition of two regular season games—with 18 percent strongly in favor. It seems that 100 percent of NFL owners and 18 percent of NFL fans selfishly require more football. The only difference is that the owners will partake in the action from luxury boxes at the stadium, and you—gluttonous fan—will watch in wing-sauce stained sweatpants from your hand-me-down recliner. The owners stand to gain a fortune from subjecting their players to further abuse, but what does the fan inherit?

Football season is a majestic debauch of chips, dip, beer, and assorted nutritional poisons, with the added bonus of seeing people we don’t know get blown-to-bits; but to insist that an already sufficient regular season be padded so owners can buy Micronesia and fans can delay walking the dog is absurd. The players of our beloved teams may represent our cities, but they are not crash-test dummies to be employed for our gratuitous entertainment.

As Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis told the New York Times, “We’re not automobiles; we’re not machines.”