The NFL goes into the playoffs with its regular-season ratings having gone up for the second straight year, the first time the league has seen back-to-back increases since 2010.

The league’s 100th season was its most viewed in four years as games averaged 16.5 million viewers on television. That is a 5% increase over 2018, according to Nielsen.

Neal Pilson, the former president of CBS Sports who now runs his own sports television consulting company, attributes the continued increases to the emergence of younger players as well as the league becoming year-around programming.

“The league is quite fortunate with young players who have had tremendous publicity in college doing quite well. They’ve also had some good games and have largely avoided off-field controversy,” he said. “The NFL has also learned from the NBA’s playbook of staying on the sports page and being relevant during the offseason with the combine and draft keeping them on the front pages for several months.”

The NFL said in a release that female viewers were up 5% over last season and that women have accounted for at least 35% of the audience for each of the past three years.

Digital streaming continues to see significant gains with a 51% jump. The league reported an average of 487,000 online viewers via different packages.

One constant is that Dallas continues to be a big draw. The Cowboys had three of the five most-watched games and they had the top game on every package except “Monday Night Football.”

Dallas’ Thanksgiving Day game against Buffalo on CBS was the top game at 32.6 million.