I don't think I've ever posted in ~Stacker_Sports, so please do let me know if this is too tangential, but I thought it was pretty interesting.

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.”

On December 1, 2025, I walked to the northeast corner of the 49ers’ Marie P. DeBartolo Sports Center practice fields in Santa Clara—a little over 100 yards from Silicon Valley Power’s Mission Substation (the city-owned 60 kV facility that replaced parts of the old Tasman Substation during stadium construction)—and turned on my gaussmeter. At 11:00 a.m. on a quiet Monday (far from peak load), it read 8.5+ milligauss (to put that in perspective, the average background level in a typical American home or office is usually between 0.5 and 3.0 mG). One hundred yards closer, in the facilities where players lift, watch film, and recover, the fields could be several times higher: potentially 13–21 mG on a normal day, spiking even higher during peak grid demand—like evening practices or hot/cold weather when more electricity flows through the substation.

The hypothesis itself is simple, but its implications are hard to ignore: these magnetic fields are systematically weakening the players’ collagen, leading to injuries under loads other teams routinely absorb.

Over months and years the structural integrity of the tendons, ligaments, and the critical muscle–tendon junctions is undermined, but the degeneration is subtle enough that it goes unnoticed until a routine cut, block, or plant suddenly ends in a catastrophic snap. The same explosive loads that other teams absorb without incident become season-ending injuries in Santa Clara. And over time, those injuries add up, leaving post-season dreams dashed, year after year. The pattern we’ve documented—decade-long leadership in games lost, the bizarre clustering of snapped Achilles tendons, the endless parade of Grade-3 tears and high-ankle syndesmosis problems—matches the biological fingerprint of prolonged ELF magnetic field exposure with striking precision.