That the Washington Redskins lost yesterday isn’t as much a story as the head-jarring hit that knocked star quarterback Robert Griffin III out of the game. Though Griffin had trouble telling the team’s medical staff what the score or quarter it was after the hit, Coach Mike Shanahan terming of RGIII’s concussion as “mild” set off a not-so-mild wave of criticisms.

Eye on Football’s Will Brinson wrote late last night:

Concussions aren’t chicken wing flavors. Calling something a “mild concussion” is like telling someone that your wife is “kind of pregnant.” A concussion is, medically speaking, known as TBI. That stands for Traumatic Brain Injury. Not mild brain injury, spicy brain injury or Caribbean jerk brain injury. Traumatic brain injury.

The term “mild,” within the context of concussions isn’t even mean to say that a concussion is less damaging. In fact, the only reason that the term mild is thrown around by doctors and health care professionals is because it’s not life-threatening. But don’t take my word for it, especially when the Center for Disease Control can tell you that.

“Health care professionals may describe a concussion as a ‘mild’ brain injury because concussions are usually not life-threatening,” the website reads. “Even so, their effects can be serious.”

The Post’s Mike Wise called the claim of a “minor” concussion “an oxymoron if there ever was one in this bone-jarring sport,” while NFL.com’s Gregg Rosenthal said that the term “downplays the severity of suffering a concussion.” Our own Associate Editor Benjamin Freed, who himself suffered a concussion after a bike accident, agreed with those assessments:

Damn it, Shanahan. There is no such thing as a “mild concussion.”

— Benjamin R. Freed (@brfreed) October 8, 2012

Getting hit in the head and not knowing what quarter it is is not “mild.” Having half of @wcp staff tell you to go to hospital is not mild.

— Benjamin R. Freed (@brfreed) October 8, 2012

Not everyone piled on to Shanahan, though. USA Today’s Chris Chase, for one, wrote that there are certainly degrees of concussions, and that coaches and staff shouldn’t shy away from saying so:

Did the football media suddenly turn into MDs and English professors? Are we all so concussion sensitive that we can’t accept all brain injuries aren’t created equal? I can Google “CDC mild concussion” and read the same report everybody else did. What I read is that the severity of concussions can vary, the same as heart attacks, strokes and forms of cancer. Assuming the concussion was not on the severe side, why is it a disservice to say that? We need more awareness about concussions. Lumping all of them together is a terrible way to do that.

On Twitter, RGIII sounded optimistic, saying: “I’m ok and I think after all the testing I will play next week.”