What's Behind a Weird Theory on 49ers Injuries

A strange storyline has surfaced in the NFL playoffs regarding the San Francisco 49ers, and it takes a little unpacking. The idea is that the 49ers have been beset by an unusual number of injuries because they practice near an electricity substation, explains USA Today. It's "nonsense," Frank de Vocht of the Bristol Medical School in England—an expert on how electromagnetic fields affect humans—tells the Washington Post. However, the theory just won't die, as evidenced by the 22 million views on a tweet this month by a believer named Peter Cowan, who describes himself as a "board-certified quantum biology practitioner."

Cowan insists that EMF exposure is causing soft-tissue damage in players, and he says the ACL injury suffered by 49ers tight end George Kittle last weekend is a prime example. Wide receiver Kendrick Bourne even jokingly blamed "that power plant" for the team's rash of injuries after the game, further pushing the notion into the mainstream—or at least getting people to wonder what he was talking about. The team does indeed suffer a lot of injuries—it's No. 2 in the league on that metric since 2017, the Athletic previously reported. But the Post punches a big hole in the idea of blaming the proximity of Levi's Stadium, which opened in 2014, to the substation. As it turns out, the team has been practicing near the substation since 1998, and from 2001 to 2014, they were actually below average in injuries.

"Just saying, 'Hey the 49ers are near the stadium; there's impact (from the substation)' probably isn't from a scientific perspective, the best way to look at this," sports medicine doctor Nirav Pandya of the University of California-San Francisco tells KRON. Still, one takeaway from the Post story is that scientists cannot definitively rule out the possibility given the lack of research. Hans Kromhout of Utrecht University tells the Post that Cowan's theory is "quite unlikely." But, he adds, "if you have indications that something is going on, it wouldn't hurt to study that." Meanwhile, the 49ers play the Seahawks on Saturday in Seattle.