There is a particular kind of losing streak that stops feeling like bad luck and starts feeling like a cosmic prank.
For the San Francisco 49ers, the last two seasons have been that kind, the sort that turns Sundays into exercises in endurance and injury reports into something resembling serialized tragedy.
Eventually, fans stop asking what happened and start asking why.
NFL’s Chief Medical Doctor on Speculation Around 49ers Injuries Caused by Electrical Substation
When the usual answers like turf, conditioning, and the randomness of football no longer feel sufficient, strange explanations start to become apparent. One such example is that the 49ers’ mounting injuries might be linked not to football, but to the electrical substation humming quietly beside Levi’s Stadium.
The theory reads like something you’d stumble upon at 1:30 a.m. It was first floated by Peter Cowan in a Substack post suggesting that low-frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs) emitted by Silicon Valley Power’s substation, located adjacent to both Levi’s Stadium and the team’s outdoor practice fields, could be subtly weakening players’ collagen.
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And to be fair, the evidence felt compelling if you squinted hard enough. The 49ers’ 2025 injury list was merciless.
George Kittle’s torn Achilles. Brandon Aiyuk’s ACL tear. Nick Bosa and Fred Warner’s season-ending ACL tear and dislocated ankle, respectively. Brock Purdy sidelined for months due to toe and shoulder injuries. Even wide receiver Ricky Pearsall missed significant time due to a lingering PCL injury.
However, the speculation met science. During the league’s health and safety call Friday, NFL chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills shut the door on the theory. He also challenged the idea that San Francisco has led the league in non-contact or lower-extremity injuries, a claim often cited by believers in the substation theory.
“That’s false,” Sills said, via The Athletic. “I would tell you that I’m not familiar with anything in the sports medicine literature that supports those associations, but I would also tell you that injury causation is really complex.”
Substations emit nonionizing radiation, the same kind of background energy people encounter daily from phones, Wi-Fi, and household electronics.
Sills: I would caution against drawing any conclusions based off publicly available data sources.
The NFL is keeping this open-ended but clearly isn’t lending much credence to the social media theories.
— Jonathan Jones (@jjones9) January 30, 2026
Other experts like UC Davis professor Jerrold Bushberg said there is no firmly established evidence that EMFs cause damage to muscles, tendons or ligaments. Bristol Medical School’s Frank de Vocht went further, dismissing the idea outright as “nonsense.”
Then there’s the detail that dismantles the entire premise: the 49ers have trained next to that same substation since 1988, long before Levi’s Stadium.
