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Amani Toomer: Tony Romo over Eli Manning is just numbers

Former New York Giants receiver Amani Toomer is taking his job as an NFL analyst for SiriusXM NFL Radio pretty seriously: He's even willing to risk slighting the quarterback he won a Super Bowl with, Eli Manning.

Given 24 hours to reconsider his assessment from Thursday that the Dallas Cowboys' Tony Romo is a better quarterback than Manning, Toomer doubled down instead.

"I love Eli, and I respect the hell out of him as a person," Toomer said Friday on WEPN-FM. "But I have to do my job, and I have to look at him beyond what the perception is because the perception doesn't always go hand in hand with the reality.

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"I was all set -- Romo's no good, he's a fourth-quarter choker -- and then I started doing my job," Toomer continued. "I started looking at the numbers. I started looking at the statistics. I started looking at the quarterback rating. And I was shocked. I was shocked at how good Tony Romo's statistics really were. This guy is really impressive.

"Then when I was on [SiriusXM NFL Radio] and we were going over the NFC East, Tim Ryan, my co-host, said [Manning] is the best quarterback in the NFC East and the Giants were going to win the division. And I was like, wait a minute. All this information I had just gathered about Tony Romo, I couldn't let him get away with it.

"So I said, 'You know what? Tony Romo, statistically, he's the better quarterback.' "

Toomer and Manning played together from 2004 to 2008, winning the Super Bowl in the 2007 season. On Thursday, Toomer had said, among other things, "...If I wanted a guy that is going to throw less interceptions, more productive, higher completion percentage, I'm going to go with Tony Romo. At crunch time, he's not as good as Eli, but every other time, he's pretty darn good."

Romo's career passer rating of 96.9 far outpaces Manning's 82.1, but Manning is 2-0 in the Super Bowl while Romo has just one playoff win in his career.

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