• by Wayne Friedman , November 7, 2006

NBC finally caught up to ABC on Sunday night, thanks to perhaps the highest-profile "Sunday Night Football" game of the NFL schedule: The Indianapolis Colts against the New England Patriots.

The preliminary 7.6 rating among adults 18-49 between the two perennial AFC powers was the second-highest-rated game of the season for NBC. The Colts won 27-20 and kept their all-wins, no-loss record perfect for the season to date.

Adding the always-lower-rated pre-game show, "Football Night in America," gave NBC a healthy 6.9 rating for the evening--topping ABC as the best network on Sunday night. That's a first in the November sweeps period. NBC had its best "SNF" game when the Colts' Peyton Manning competed against brother Eli and the New York Giants in the season opener.

ABC still showed strength in the first Sunday sweep period outing--improving Sunday numbers from the non-sweep week before to a 5.7/14.

With a 9.0 rating among 18-49 viewers, "Desperate Housewives" scored its best numbers since September's season premiere. The show has now been climbing for two weeks. Although its lead-out show, rookie "Brothers & Sisters," continues to drop a good chunk of viewers from "Housewives," its numbers have also risen. "Brothers" moved to a 5.5, its best since a 6.2 in week one.

CBS landed in third place--benefiting, as always, from a nice NFL overrun earlier in the evening. Coupled with "60 Minutes," it gave the network a 5.7 rating bump in the 7 p.m. hour. CBS cruised at lower levels the rest of the night with generally high 3.0 ratings among 18-49 viewers from its rhyming Sunday trio: "Amazing Race," "Cold Case" and "Without a Trace." For the night, CBS tallied a 4.1/10.

Fox was next with a 3.5/9. Its Sunday lineup of comedies offered "The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror" as its best-performing show of the night, with a 4.9. Second-best for Fox was "Family Guy" at a 4.0.

The CW and Univision tied for fifth with a 0.9/2. For the CW, a couple of reruns of "Supernatural" and "America's Next Top Model" were the primary reasons for its mediocre performance. Univision's best came from a 1.2 rating among 18-49s with the two-hour "Reyes de la Canción."