In the last 10 years, the San Francisco 49ers have been consistently unable to remain healthy. Season after season, their elite roster has been plagued by soft-tissue injuries and tendon ruptures. The daunting number in the sick bay and its financial burden on the team in the 2025 season have made it even more concerning.
Advertisement
According to Over the Cap, the 49ers lost more than $95 million in salary cap value to injured players this season. That’s the highest total in the NFL and nearly a quarter of their adjusted payroll.
Nick Bosa, Fred Warner, Brandon Aiyuk, and several other big names have missed significant time. This continues a pattern that has haunted the franchise since its move to Levi’s Stadium in 2014. That decade-long injury trend is what’s sparked an unusual and controversial theory.
Earlier this month, Peter Cowan, founder of Sunlight is Life and Living Energy Wellness, published a detailed post on Substack. In it, he explored whether chronic electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure from a nearby electrical substation could be contributing to the 49ers’ persistent tendon and soft-tissue injuries.
Cowan, however, was careful to frame his work not as an NFL analysis but as a human-health case study. “The 49ers are statistically the most injured team in the NFL over the past decade,” he wrote, noting that the Niners have routinely ranked near the bottom of the league in Adjusted Games Lost (AGL).
That includes catastrophic years like 2020 and 2024, when their injury burden far exceeded league averages. And this is where the EMF theory comes into play. It initially gained traction after a revealing comment from retired 49ers guard Jon Feliciano.
“Players have joked around about there being an electrical substation that’s right next to the practice field and how that has led to the Niners’ injury problems,” Feliciano had said. Cowan decided to investigate that “joke.”
Using a gaussmeter near the 49ers’ practice facility, he recorded magnetic field readings significantly higher than typical background levels. He then argued that players could be experiencing chronic, unavoidable exposure during training sessions.
Cowan claims that prolonged EMF exposure may subtly weaken collagen structures in tendons and ligaments over time. That degradation, he argues, would make routine football movements more likely to result in ruptures and high-grade tears.
What makes this theory even more compelling is the injury pattern itself. Since 2014, the 49ers have suffered an unusually high number of ‘Achilles and patellar tendon ruptures, recurring Grade-3 hamstring and calf tears, and high-ankle syndesmosis injuries’. All of these are injuries to collagen-rich tissue.
As whacky as the theory sounds, it also remains logical and data-driven enough to warrant some consideration. But in the NFL circles, this idea remains controversial. Per analyst Chase Senior, discussing this topic publicly has often been met with ridicule.
“I brought this up and was called a conspiracy theorist and the Alex Jones of NFL content creators. But experts in this field continue to say it could be a reason why the 49ers deal with so many injury problems,” Senior tweeted.
I brought this up and was called a conspiracy theorist and the Alex Jones of NFL content creators.
But experts in this field continue to say it could be a reason why the 49ers deal with so many injury problems.
Fascinating thread and worth looking into. https://t.co/ncT0q7EgP0
— Chase Senior (@Chase_Senior) January 7, 2026
The skepticism isn’t surprising either because, as per Cowan’s Substack post, Federal and international safety guidelines only recognize EMF harm when it produces measurable heat, not long-term biological effects. The substation near Levi’s Stadium is considered safe as per those standards.
So, does Cowan’s hypothesis definitively explain the 49ers’ injury struggle? No. Even Cowan acknowledges that variables like luck and football violence still play roles. But with a decade of being a statistical outlier, the study does raise a fair question.
At a minimum, the theory challenges whether the league has fully examined every environmental variable affecting a player’s health. And for a franchise that keeps losing its big stars to injuries, perhaps exploring the uncharted avenues is worth it, too.
