The NFL’s top medical expert says he is aware of no evidence to lend credence to a widely shared theory on why the 49ers might have experienced an abundance of injuries.
Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said the data, in fact, suggests the overall premise is faulty.
“One of the things that’s been said is that that club (49ers) has led the league in non-direct contact and lower-extremity injuries,” Sills said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. “That’s simply not true. That’s false.”
The 49ers might not lead the NFL in injuries, but the team saw some of its top players sidelined for extended periods of time due to injuries this season.
Defensive linemen Nick Bosa and Mykel Williams were lost to season-ending ACL tears, while linebacker Fred Warner sustained a fractured and dislocated ankle. In the 49ers’ first playoff game, tight end George Kittle suffered a torn Achilles.
Without citing any research or data, a theory has made its way via social media that tries to link a correlation between an electrical substation next to the 49ers’ practice field in Santa Clara and football injuries.
The electrical substation predated the 49ers moving their practice facility to its current location in 1988.
“We’re aware of those reports,” Dr. Sills said. “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.”
Dr. Sills pointed out a number of factors that often lead to football injuries that range in severity.
“If you think about biology and medicine, you usually don’t have one single factor that drives biological systems,” Dr. Sills said. “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, it’s 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.”
Dr. Sills said the league has seen erroneous conclusions drawn from incomplete information using publicly available data.
“There’s research that often gets published where people take injury reports that are distributed in the media and use that to try to assess an injury burden, and those are almost universally wrong, because they’re just not complete,” he said.