A theory has emerged in recent weeks regarding the perceived uptick in 49ers’ injuries and the proximity of their practice field to an electrical substation. The issue was raised on Friday morning, through a question presented during an NFL player health and safety media briefing.
The topic was addressed by Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s Chief Medical Officer.
“Obviously, we’re aware of those reports,” Dr. Sills said. “Listen, I would say we look at injury causation across the board. We consult with experts throughout sports medicine and other industries to try to understand and gain as comprehensive an understanding of injury causation as we can.
“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. If you think about biology and medicine, you don’t have usually one single factor that drives biological systems. And so when we think about injury causation, whether it’s lower extremity strains or ACL or concussion . . . it’s equipment, it’s training, it’s prior injury history, its exposure, it’s play type. There’s so many things that go into that. And so, I think it’s very rare in a biological system that you’ll see one factor that really drives an injury risk.
“So with that being said, we look at all factors, we look at it very comprehensively. I think it’s also important . . . to say that we have seen significant erroneous conclusions drawn from people using publicly-available data sources. And what I mean by that is there’s research that often gets published where people take injury reports that are distributed in media and use that to try to assess an injury burden. And those are almost universally wrong because they’re just not complete. And they’re not complete because they don’t have all the data because not everything gets put into those disclosure systems.
“And so that’s why we put so much stock in our own data, because we know we have a complete record through the electronic health record, all 32 clubs reporting to that record. We have a world-class data science and epidemiology company that extracts all that data, goes and analyzes it. We have the full picture of those injuries. . . .
“So we try to be transparent, but we try to be comprehensive, and I would just caution again against drawing any conclusions based on publicly-available data sources. And I’ll just dive one notch deeper into that. One of the things that’s been said is that that club has led the league in non-direct contact lower extremity injuries. That’s simply not true. That’s false. So I think we have obviously a lot of work to do on all these injuries and we’ll consider any and all mechanisms, but that’s sort of the maybe broader picture on that particular question.”
It’s a tactful way of saying the theory, which first emerged on social media, is likely erroneous — but that it won’t be categorically rejected.
The best evidence, in our view, for debunking the theory is that the 49ers have practiced next to the substation since 1988. And that the broader subject is injuries that happen during an inherently physical activity, with hitting and twisting and changing of direction and high rates of human-generated speed.
It would be one thing if people at an office building next to a substation were pulling calf muscles or hamstrings while walking from their cubicles to the break room and back. For a pro football team that has practiced in the same place for 37 years, the idea that a perceived recent spike in injuries relates to the proximity of an electrical substation and not the many other factors that result in football players getting hurt is, with all due respect, kooky on its face.
