Want more ways to catch up on the latest in Bay Area sports? Sign up for the Section 415 email newsletter here and subscribe to the “Section 415” podcast wherever you listen.
Conspiracy theories about the electrical substation adjacent to the 49ers’ training facility and Levi’s Stadium are not new. For years, players have mused about the station, which is operated by Silicon Valley Power and was expanded in conjunction with the stadium’s 2014 opening. Social media posts pondering its impact on injuries have popped up from time to time.
But none went viral until this month, when a post on X (opens in new tab) from a user named Peter Cowan — who claimed that electromagnetic fields, or EMF, from the substation could be weakening players’ connective tissues — spread like wildfire. Podcaster Joe Rogan, who has tens of millions of followers across media platforms, discussed the topic last week.
There is no factual basis to the theory, though — and the data collection behind the viral post is flimsy at best. In his hypothesis, Cowan wrote, “I was not able to access the facilities and my estimates could be wrong. If the fields are lower than my estimates, then that’s the end of the substation story for now.”
The problem for the 49ers, though, lies outside the scope of reason — and it’s important to view the substation hoopla through this broader lens. Regardless of the truth, this has become a perception problem. Margins are tiny in the highly competitive world of the NFL, so if the 49ers’ leverage in free-agent and contractual markets is compromised even slightly by a runaway freight train of a theory, team leadership must respond.
Today
4 days ago
Tuesday, Jan. 20
That happened at last week’s end-of-season press conference, at which 49ers GM John Lynch answered a substation question that would’ve been unthinkable prior to Cowan’s viral post.
“Because it deals with allegedly the health and safety of our players, I think you have to look into everything,” Lynch said. “We’ve been reaching out to anyone and everyone to see, does a study exist other than a guy sticking an apparatus underneath the fence and coming up with a number that I have no idea what that means?
“That’s what we know exists. We’ve heard that debunked. So yes, we will look into it. We have looked into it. The health and safety of our players is of the utmost priority. … Our ownership, Jed [York] is tremendous in terms of resources, and we’ll always be cognizant of things. I know that a lot of games have been won at this facility since it opened. But yeah, we aren’t going to turn a blind eye. We’ll look into everything.”
The subtext of Lynch’s answer remains clear: The 49ers are, at the very least, extremely skeptical of Cowan’s post. But they felt the need to respond to it in a formal setting, which is the more significant issue at play.
The injury data was parsed in this video (opens in new tab) by Dr. Brian Sutterer, a sports medicine specialist in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to isolate the soft tissue, fracture, and ligament injuries that are allegedly exacerbated by EMF. The findings do not place the 49ers as an NFL outlier. Yes, the 2025 team was hampered by severe injuries to several prominent players. And yes, the 49ers have been on the upper end of league averages in injury rate and games missed over the past few seasons. But they’re not a statistical outlier — and the substation hypothesis is based on the supposition that they are an anomaly. (Sutterer’s data analysis suggests that roster age might actually be the primary culprit behind the 49ers’ elevated injury rate.)
It isn’t hard to predict how dynamics will evolve. Super Bowl 60 is coming to Levi’s Stadium in less than two weeks, and that — with the deluge of content that surrounds one of the world’s biggest media events — should only intensify substation talk just over a month before the NFL’s free-agency window opens.
Then, football players will suffer more injuries. That’s inevitable; this is a violent sport. And it’s reasonable to expect that every single 49ers injury will — in at least some conversations — be tied to the substation, and that will be a reminder of what went viral. Fuel will continually be poured onto the fire — truth be damned.
Perception problems don’t wait for logic or facts, and that leaves the 49ers in a quandary. They have acknowledged that they will look into the data — they had no other realistic choice. But in doing so, they’ve put themselves in a corner.
Before free agency opens, the franchise may have to make a convincing case to prospective players that practicing next to the substation won’t increase the risk of injury — and fighting the tidal wave of perception can be a thankless task.