The NFL continues to be a huge TV draw, although ratings are slightly lower than last season’s robust performance.

Through the first five weeks of the season, NFL games on broadcast and cable TV are averaging 18.3 million viewers — falling just short of the average through five games last season (18.6 million).

As a benchmark of the NFL’s popularity from a TV standpoint, consider this: since the NFL season began on Sept. 8, 12 of the 15 most-watched telecasts have been NFL games.

That includes the Saints-Packers game on opening night, which drew a whopping 27.1 million viewers, and the Giants-Redskins game, which aired on the first Sunday of the season (Sept. 11) and drew 26 million viewers.

And, since last year’s Super Bowl, nine of the top 10-most-watched sporting events on TV have been NFL games — the only exception being Game 6 of the NBA Finals (Dallas-Miami), which snared nearly 24 million viewers.

NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” has averaged 23 million viewers this season — a record pace — and the six most-watched cable programs, since the NFL season began, are “Monday Night Football” games on ESPN.

Only Ashton Kutcher’s much-hyped debut on the season premiere of “T
wo and a Half Men” (29 million), the show’s Sept. 26 episode (21 million) — and the season premiere of “NCIS” (20 million) — have kept pace with NFL numbers thus far.

Other highly rated games include the Cowboys-Jets Sunday-night game on Sept. 11 (26 million), the Packers-Bears matchup on Sept. 25 (24 million on Fox) and the Sunday-night Eagles-Falcons game on Sept. 18 (23 million), which featured Michael Vick’s return to Atlanta.

Last season, NFL football on TV averaged 17.9 million viewers during the regular season.

That was an increase of 1.3 million viewers from 2009 and was the highest viewership since the 1989 season, which averaged 18 million viewers (in the days before the NFL was available on cable, and online viewing didn’t yet exist).