So is the electrical substation near the San Francisco 49ers practice facility to blame for all of the injuries or not?
It depends on who you ask. If you ask any NFL fan, they’d at least tell you that the 49ers do seem to have the most injured team in the league. That’s because year after year, the pro football team in Southern California racks up an unreal amount of injuries, and this past season was much of the same.
And it doesn’t just seem like the 49ers are the most injured team in the NFL. There’s actually a study that found they are statistically the most injured squad in the past decade. Many have tried to figure out why that’s the case, or if the team’s trainer is to blame. That would be too easy of an explanation, eh?
One idea that people are now really paying attention to is posed by a self-described scientist and EMF (electromagnetic field) researcher named Peter Cowan, who recently shared his theory about all of the 49ers’ injuries. He strongly believes that it can all be explained by the fact that the team’s practice facility and stadium sit beside a large electrical substation.
According to Cowan, consistent exposure to extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields is “degrading the collagen integrity in the players tendons, ligaments, and muscle-tendon junctions. The damage is subtle, until a routine cut or block ends in catastrophic rupture.”
The theory has been largely dismissed by doctors, but NFL players both on the 49ers and throughout the league have expressed concern. Some have even gone as far to tell their agents that they don’t want to play in San Francisco. That obviously creates a free-agency issue with the 49ers, and the noise around the electrical substation theory has gotten so loud that the team’s general manager, John Lynch, is now confirming that the 49ers are looking into it.
And even some of the San Francisco 49ers stars are voicing whether they think the substation close to their practice facility is a real concern or a complete conspiracy. During a recent interview with Front Office Sports, fullback Kyle Juszczyk shared that the team has wondered about the potential problem for “years,” and says he’s curious what the organization will find as they look into it:
“The science is not clear behind it. I’m very much a science driven person. I want to see the numbers and statistics. Is it a coincidence that we’ve led the NFL in injuries for the last decade? I don’t know. It very well could be…
There’s a lot that goes into it, and if (the substation) may be some of it, I am very curious. I really am. I want to see what someone who truly understands that field has to say about it.”
The players do deserve to know one way or the other, don’t you think?
Clearly, Juszczyk cares a lot about getting to the bottom of the electrical substation theory. But another star on the 49ers – linebacker Fred Warner (who actually suffered a year-ending injury this past season) – doesn’t buy any of it. In fact, when he was a guest on the St. Brown Podcast, he offered up an entirely different theory:
“There’s a lot of mixed reviews about that, I think at the end of the day, when you look at the actual data behind ‘Is that real or not?’ I think that’s false. I’ll be the first to tell you, because I train year-round at our facility. And I’m not going to sit here and say a substation is the reason why I got my ankle broke in half, that was a fluke injury, right?
But before that, I had missed one game. I had one game missed on a fluke (hamstring injury) where I stepped wrong. I had been super healthy for seven-plus years. The substation may have gave me superpowers, I don’t know. I guess if you just overdose on it, you get Hulk strength or something.”
Sounds like the players are split on it (I really do love Fred Warner’s take on the whole thing), and still need to see more information come out and studies to be completed to come to an actual conclusion.
All that being said, the story is still crazy… and the only way it could get crazier is if the San Francisco 49ers eventually do find out that the electrical substation next to their facility is contributing to the plague of injuries that their team faces year in and year out.
