I think what a lot of people are forgetting is that concussions aren't a consistent injury. It's not standard weight and measurement type stuff.
They aren't all of the same severity and beyond this each person reacts differently to them. Even then, what exactly is a concussion given that under some people's definition a concussion might happen to just about every player a few times a game, every game. (that's the whole....a concussion is any impact that causes some sort of seeing stars)
They do tend to become more frequent the more you get and/or the worse one was. They also are very serious and should weigh heavily into any athlete's mindset of whether or not to continue playing.
But I also think we have a bit of an overreaction to them at this point. One way of controlling behavior is to traumatize people or scare them, and people have been scared by concussions. As serious and scary as they are, there generally are signs that people are heading that way. I think Kolb is right there at that point, and given the money he's made, imo quitting would be best. But we should recognize we have been inundated with all the hype around concussions (like from the NFL and NFLPA) and it may be clouding our judgment on it.
Some people recover fine, others don't, but I don't believe Swope is at that point yet where he's in that sort of danger. Perhaps one day he will be, but not yet.
I don't think Fitz really has any information. Perhaps Swope was lying during the draft process, but the four he has had he's described as minor, and didn't keep him from missing any playing time.
Kolb missing significant time and still feeling the effects a month or two after the season has gotten us a little trigger happy on calling concussion severity of our other players.
Swope, unless we've been lied to, has not had anywhere near the type of severity that Kolb had.
Plus considering the nature of Swope's potential contributions versus that of a starting QB, and being a part of a receiving corps such as ours, he doesn't have the weight of the world on his shoulders.
We don't have all the information. So I think we need to take a step back and wait and see how long he goes before he gets a concussion on this level and see how his body responds to it before we start jumping to conclusions.
No missed time and being described as minor simply doesn't align itself with what Fitz said. The quote is also a bit weird. It almost sounds as if Fitz is referring to Swope's in the context of college concussions. Perhaps it was just a communication error by either the encoder or decoder. (fitz or whoever he was talking to)
