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All the posturing about an NFL lockout in 2011 is just that — posturing.

There won’t be a lockout. If there is, Roger Goodell should be institutionalized, examined by a team of psychiatrists, removed from office and replaced by Pacman Jones.

Starting today — with NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith’s Super Bowl press briefing and culminating with Goodell’s Friday address — you’re about to be inundated with stories about a looming lockout.

Ignore them. The owners — and their paid mouthpiece, Goodell — are not nearly as stupid as they’ll sound and look over the next year.

Yeah, they hired the genius attorney, Bob Batterman, who oversaw the “successful” NHL lockout that helped make professional hockey more irrelevant. Yes, the NFL negotiated TV contracts that pay the league even if there is no 2011 season. And, yes, there are a handful of owners — Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson, Jacksonville’s Wayne Weaver and Minnesota’s Zygi Wilf — too incompetent to turn a large profit in a league that prints money.

But short of Wilson, Weaver and Wilf executing an assassination plot of Jerry Jones, Daniel Snyder, Paul Allen and most of their other peers, there is zero chance of a lockout.

You don’t hit the eject button at the very moment the league is about to land on the moon.

That’s the message Goodell should be and will be communicating privately to the owners whining about the “bad” collective bargaining agreement his predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, and Smith’s predecessor, Gene Upshaw, struck in 2006.

Whatever discomfort billionaire NFL owners might have with sharing more than half of their total revenue with millionaire players, the owners will get over it when Goodell explains what their partnership with players has wrought.

The popularity, TV-ratings-driving and cultural-influence distances between the NFL and Major League Baseball and the NFL and the NBA have never been wider.

The Pro Bowl — the most worthless sporting event known to man, a game ditched by 40 percent of the roster this year — garnered massive ratings on ESPN. The NFL is a force of nature right now.

No way it does anything to slow its momentum. No one — not the owners, players or television executives addicted to NFL ratings — is pumping the NFL brakes. Not now. Not when the league has a finite number of years to ride the Peyton Manning-Tom Brady-Brett Favre gravy train.

Guess when David Stern locked out NBA players? Months after Michael Jordan’s second retirement.

An NFL work stoppage in 2011 would be the equivalent of baseball shutting down midway through the summer of 1998 (McGwire-Sosa) or the NBA calling it quits just before Magic and Bird met in the 1984 NBA Finals.

You don’t pull the plug on Manning and Brady, the most compelling reality TV stars this side of Jon and Kate.

Major League Baseball certainly doesn’t have a competiator for Manning and Brady or Brees and Favre or Romo and Roethlisberger or (Eli) Manning and McNabb or even Rivers and Rodgers.

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