interview with Jordan Rose of Complex<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cOne of my teammates put it really good, Kyle Juszyczyk, our fullback,\u201d Kittle said. \u201cAnd he said, \u2018As a professional athlete, you\u2019re always trying to get one percent better.\u2019 Like, \u2018Is this ice tub, is this rehab-recovery thing, is this red-light therapy, does it make me one-percent better?\u2019 Because then you can stack all those up and you\u2019re like, \u2018Hey, you\u2019re three-percent better than the next guy because you\u2019re doing all this stuff.\u2019 If something\u2019s affecting like negatively 0.25 percent, you\u2019d want to know about it. Like whether it\u2019s this type of cleat is hurting me, this type of shoulder pads is, like, increas[ing] my risk to get hurt. You\u2019d probably change that. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo I think all we\u2019re saying is, as players, it\u2019s like, we would just like to look into it to make sure it\u2019s not something. That\u2019s what I would just appreciate. Like, \u2018Hey, this isn\u2019t gonna affect you guys.\u2019 And then if they come out and they do some research, like, \u2018No, you guys are good,\u2019 then I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a fair and reasonable request and the 49ers have said they\u2019ll look into it. Unfortunatey, we live in a post-truth dystopia in which self-serving opinion trumps fact.<\/p>\n
Thus, regardless of what the research shows, someone won\u2019t believe it. And Kittle has something that could justify someone\/anyone to reject the research as unreliable.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow. one thing that messes me up with it \u2014 this is tough,\u201d Kittle said. \u201cMy rookie season, there used to be trees in between the electrical substation and our practice facility, and there\u2019s a fence there, too. And above the fence, all the trees had no leaves on them, year-round. . . . All dead. There\u2019s a couple bunches of leaves every once in a while, and it was like that \u2014 no one notices it until you point it out to people. Like, I didn\u2019t point it out to coach [Kyle] Shanahan until like 2021. <\/p>\n
\u201cLike, that was pointed out to me my rookie season, I was like, \u2018That\u2019s kind of weird, yeah. It is what it is.\u2019 But then this year the NFL came in and cut them all down. So they\u2019re not there anymore, so no one can see them. So it\u2019s only us vets that know that that was the truth. I don\u2019t think anyone\u2019s talking about that yet, but that one messed me up. I was like, \u2018Oh my goodness, there\u2019s no loose on these trees. Why?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Kittle then tried to make light of the situation, after lighting the fuse on the dead-tree theory.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy argument for it is this,\u201d Kittle said. \u201cLike, Fred Warner, he practices there and trains there year-round, and he\u2019s had one injury his entire career. So it\u2019s like \u2014 now, did he just evolve and he absorbed the radiation? I don\u2019t know. I\u2019m kidding, I\u2019m kidding. But it\u2019s just like, let\u2019s just figure out if it\u2019s actually harming the players or not, and hopefully it\u2019s not. It\u2019s easy.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy, as long as the outcome of the team\u2019s examination of the issue is accepted. No matter what the 49ers conclude, someone will dispute it. And someone who has an offer to join the team in free agency will choose to take the same offer from a team with a practice facility that presents no risk whatsoever, credible or not, from the proximity of an electrical substation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The question of whether the proximity of an electrical substation to the 49ers\u2019 practice facility continues to drive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463555,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-463554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}