49ers' wretched injury curse predates Kyle Shanahan (and facts prove it)

No team has been hit harder by injuries dating back to 2017 than the San Francisco 49ers.

For those fans unlucky enough to watch the Niners lose to the Houston Texans in Week 8, a graphic on the Fox Sports broadcast made the above statement a fact rather than any suggestion of hyperbole.

Since Shanahan took over his duties in 2017, his players have missed a total of 2,036 games -- most in the NFL over that span.

Granted, when San Francisco has been healthy under Shanahan (it's been rare), the end result has been good (see the two Super Bowl years in 2019 and 2023). But, the hard reality is Shanahan's teams have a reputation for being banged up and then some, leading to an unbelievable amount of spend on players who wind up on injured lists.

So far this year, top-paid stars like tight end George Kittle, wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk, defensive end Nick Bosa and linebacker Fred Warner have all ended up on injury lists in some capacity or another, and that doesn't even cover the full rank of injured players the roster has had to overcome.

That leads to a simple conclusion, right? Shanahan (or at least his training staff) is to blame.

Well, not exactly. If anything, it's far from it.

49ers' injury problems predate Kyle Shanahan by a long shot

There are plenty of resources out there that have tracked injury attrition across the league (some of those resources are now defunct), but said data indicates the 49ers' horrid injury luck predates Shanahan by quite some time.

According to Football Outsiders' adjusted-games-lost metric, the Niners averaged the most injuries in the league from 2013 through 2021:

That means San Francisco's injury woes span multiple coaching regimes and even a different stadium, which also includes different strength and conditioning groups and assistants.

In short, different leadership, same problem.

49ers' injury problems defy logic at this point

The Bosa, Aiyuk and Warner injuries were all on-the-field freak moments, essentially unavoidable by any means of strength and conditioning.

But, the other soft-tissue injuries may lead some to think the 49ers are somehow doing things wrong.

An excerpt from a 2022 article by KNBR 680 on this very same subject (how about that trend) explored the hard reality of the Niners knowing all too well of the injury woes and have done whatever possible to try and prevent them:

"I have no idea how you solve this. Clearly the 49ers don’t, either, or something would change. They overhauled their training staff in 2019. That hasn’t solved their woes.

It is an organization which is pretty universally viewed as well run. If there was a clear answer, they would have found it.

The only logical proposal I can come up with is to invest more money into player health. But that’s a vague suggestion. Maybe hire more analysts to analyze how the team gets injured and how to prevent that? More trainers? More everything?

All that said — and while there are no figures readily available — this organization invests plenty into its training staff. Ben Peterson, the team’s head of player health & performance, has an office at the entrance of the team’s locker room. There’s a brand new recovery room in the locker room itself. ...

If you want this training staff fired, that’s your prerogative. It’s a reasonable enough instinct as the most logical area to blame.

But this has been an issue regardless of who runs the team’s training staff. There’s no evidence to suggest changing the training staff for the second time in four years would solve the issue."

In summary, what you probably think Shanahan and Co. need to do to mitigate injuries, they've already done. And done again.

But, that's not working.

The article continued in a dark-humor kind of way, almost leading to a conclusion that's the final one to make even the most remote sense:

"Forget logical explanations. We’re past that point.

Curses, hexes, some combination of necromancy and voodoo explain this team’s health woes more satisfactorily than any pseudo-scientific suggestion. Halloween’s around the corner anyway; at this point, the 49ers might as well experiment with dark magic. Traditional means haven’t been effective."

Perhaps it is just a curse. That might be the only explanation left.