FOXBORO — They’ve finally done it. The suits in New York who run the NFL have finally done the impossible.

They’ve made pro football boring.

If there was any entertainment value in what went on yesterday at Gillette Stadium it was only if you were a FanDuel geek or gave the 131⁄2 points and bet the kids’ college fund on the Patriots. That is not an indictment of the Patriots, who did exactly what a great team should do when facing a junior varsity opponent. They beat the pants off the woefully incompetent Jacksonville Jaguars, 51-17.

To be clear about it, those two teams could have been playing under any rules and the outcome would have been the same. They could have played 1920s Neanderthal Ball, they could have played in the aerial circus days of the AFL or they could have played with Roller Ball rules. It would have made no difference.

So this is not a commentary on what occurred yesterday, as the Patriots rolled into their bye week 3-0. This is about the game itself.

The one-sided nature of the rules have turned football into a mockery. This has been going on for about a half decade now but when it gets to the point where an inadvertent TAP ON THE HELMET results in “roughing the passer,” then we no longer know what the word “roughing” means.

For the record, according to the dictionary at least, the word roughing is defined as “characterized by or done with violence or forcefulness.” If essentially high-fiving Tom Brady’s face mask, which is the sum of what Jacksonville’s Dan Skuta did, constitutes “roughing the passer” then we are no longer even playing touch football. We are playing touchy-feely football, which is to say not football at all.

Again this is not Brady’s fault. It’s the fault of the men who run the game, most of whom are trained in marketing not mayhem, the latter being the foundation upon which the game was built. What those suits believe is that fans want points and aren’t smart enough to realize that many of the points today are a result of defense having been outlawed.

It’s become like telling Jordan Spieth to play tournament golf without bunkers, water or trees in his way.

An example of this came when Jaguars reserve defensive back Peyton Thompson was flagged for a horse-collar tackle on running back LeGarrette Blount. Blount outweighs Thompson by 70 pounds and was running at him full speed and unimpeded. Thompson grabbed THE BACK OF HIS JERSEY and was flagged. He didn’t have his hand anywhere near his collar. He didn’t fall across the back of his legs, either. He tackled a guy by grabbing his shirt. When did grabbing someone’s shirt become a football felony?

What the game has turned into is basketball without hand checking. You can’t touch a receiver so they run freely all over the field. Joe Montana knows a thing or two about football, so I asked him last week what he thought of all those wide-open shallow crosses Julian Edelman makes a living from. His response was telling.

“If we’d tried that, the receiver wouldn’t have played another game for a month,” Montana said.

In other words, he would have been decapitated. That’s what football was. What it’s become is a game where the McCown brothers, career backups, went 59-for-87 for 651 passing yards yesterday. The McCown brothers?

Maybe that entertains some people, but so does the tattooed lady and they both belong in the circus.

If you believe what the NFL is selling you today is football, then you have no idea what football is supposed to be or what it was for most of its 90-year history.

When the rules are so severely altered as to make the game unbalanced and leaning unfairly in one direction farther than the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it makes a mockery of the numbers.

If one wants to debate it, consider this: Twenty-three of the top 35 single-season passing years have occurred since 2010. That’s 66 percent of the top single-season performances.

You really believe this is the same game as the one that made pro football a national phenomenon?

What football has become is what baseball became after they juiced both the balls and the players: a phony show of offense. The rules are juiced and so are the numbers.

“I often have that conversation with my dad,” said special teamer Matthew Slater, whose father Jackie played 20 years in the NFL and was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2001, which was about the same time the suits began to destroy the game by outlawing defense while legalizing holding. “Football is so different now. It’s not the same game he played. There’s no question the rules have changed the nature of the game.

“They’ve changed the way you can attack the defense. They’ve changed the way they play defense. They’ve changed the kicking game. The game is as successful (financially) as it’s ever been so they’re doing something right, but I don’t think my dad is a huge fan of it. Personally, I can’t say I’m a fan of it either.”

If Slater’s father was playing today he not only would never have missed a block, he never would have allowed a defensive lineman to get off the line of scrimmage. What Jim Parker or Anthony Munoz or Art Shell, perhaps the three best offensive tackles in football history, would have done to them would resemble legalized hog-tying.

Whatever it is they’re playing in the NFL today, it’s not football. It’s something the same suits who called Deflategate a felony conviction came up with to please fans they believe don’t know the difference between real football and fantasy football.

That has nothing to do with the Patriots, who scored every time they had the ball yesterday beyond pointing out this: If any professional team can score on another professional team every time it has the ball there’s something wrong with the game they’re playing because it’s not a game anymore. It’s a joke.