As Super Bowl LX rolls into Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium, Jake Rockatansky and Travis View are joined by sports writer Arif Hasan (Wide Left newsletter) to dig into one of the NFL’s strangest modern fan obsessions: the idea that the San Francisco 49ers are cursed by an electrical substation.

Over the last decade the Niners have become infamous for suffering from brutal, momentum-killing injuries. This has fueled endless theories about potential reasons for the medical incidents that are causing heartburn among football fans in the Bay Area. Is it turf, training, recruiting strategy, bad luck, or something else?

One rumor has dominated the online discourse: the idea that the Northern Receiving Station, right next to where the pro athletes train and play, is bathing players in “EMF” and making them more injury-prone. We trace how the theory travelled from locker room chatter, to online content creators, to a “board-certified quantum biology practitioner” until it finally had to be addressed by the 49ers administration and NFL’s chief medical officer. This is despite the fact that the idea doesn’t have any empirical support and it doesn’t even make sense upon examination of the timeline of the substation.

Wide Left: A newsletter about the NFL and its intersection with politics and culture

https://www.wideleft.football/

Arif Hasan

https://x.com/ArifHasanNFL?lang=en

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Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media and binge the entirety of our exclusive shows Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Truly, Tradly, Deely by Annie Kelly

https://cursedmedia.net

Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com)

https://qaapodcast.com

QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.