Slower games and more flags — say what you will about the NFL, but it really knows what the people want.

Apparently completely unaware of the diminishing attention spans of the American public, the NFL of 2015 is seeing more flags than ever, with a record 733 accepted penalties through Week 3 (according to nflpenalties.com), up from the old mark of 716, set one decade ago. That included a whopping 298 penalties in Week 2 (also a record), which averages to 19 per game.

And those are just the accepted penalties! Add in penalties that were declined or offset (140) and there have been 873 flags thrown this year.

• The teams with the most penalties: Tampa and Oakland (33). The team with the least: Arizona (17).

• The most popular penalty: Offensive holding (154). (Oh, that’s offensive, all right.) The second most: False start (119). The NFL is truly making the old adage — “you can call holding on every play” — true. Nobody wants that one to be proven correctly.

• The three least popular penalties through Week 3 have all been called just once: 12 men on the field (offense), illegal substitution, roughing the kicker and illegal blindside block. Three other penalties (ineligible downfield kick, disqualification and illegal touch pass) haven’t been called at all.

In what might be a coincidence, a direct result of the flags or a mixture of both, NFL games are also taking longer, clocking in at 3:11, which is five minutes more than the average from last year’s games. The big difference: There haven’t been any overtime games in 2015. There had been five at this point last year. So the games are taking even longer when you account that there haven’t been extra sessions.

The longest game was a three hour, 39 minute affair between the Carolina Panthers and Houston Texans. The quickest game was two hours, 49 minutes, played by the San Francisco 49ers and Minnesota Vikings in that bizarro Week 1 MNF late game. Only seven of the 48 games played this year have taken under three hours.

More flags, more time. This is the opposite of what people want. And unless measures are taken to combat this, the NFL could end up going the way of college football, which has become almost unwatchable with games routinely stretching past three-and-a-half hours. Set the goal at three hours, NFL, then work backward from there.