Originally posted by English:
Originally posted by JayinUT:
Sounds to me like the Niners need to get a new conditioning coach and team and really look at how they condition their players in the off season.
It's been said before. And they did.
there is probably some pretty awesome math that could be wrapped up in this. Like we know the 49ers have different values on Linemen, Speed Backs, Shifty WRs...even TEs compare to many other teams. Not saying there is 100% a correlation, but even slightly smaller people in a big person sport MIGHT matter. Plus the numbers are going to be a tad skewed when we KNOW the 49ers have given injury plagued players opportunities.
If we are just looking at "games lost to injury". (49ers are often in the top 5) that stat is bent by roster construction as well as any additional possible training issue. When you keep guys around like Dee Ford, jimmy G, Jason Verrett hell even CMC is a calculated risk. You know they have a really strong chance to miss time, but you take the risk and hope you can manage it and get them on the same page in the playoffs when it matters.
Some teams are VERY risk adverse, the 49ers embrace the boom or bust. Bosa might not be the best example, but he is an example... you have a guy who has a major injury in college...you still take him high in the draft and he suffers a very similar injury in the NFL and misses a ton of time....stuff like that skews injury statistics and its real hard to "pin" that on the Strength and conditioning coaches, especially if your comparing to NFL averages. Some players are just injury prone no S&C team is going to mitigate that when you make that a tenet of the franchise.
Anyway....that is my take on it.... I think the 49ers agree with JAyinUT TBH just look at what they have done with the trainers:
2017–2018: Fired longtime head trainer Jeff Ferguson.
2019–2020: Ben Peterson and Dustin Little ran the program, then Peterson was let go after a rash of ACL/hamstring injuries.
2022–2023: Hired Dustin Perry
The 49ers are not sitting on their hands they are hunting for better results
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just a follow up on this, to satisfy my own curiosity...I do not want to talk about how much time I spent tonight researching this.......
there is so much correlation between injuries and playing surfaces....
Levi's is not even mentioned in two different field safety reports...it appears to be statistically a pretty safe playing surface. On top of that half of our divisional games on average are played on grass...that puts the 49ers right at that 50% league average of grass vs turf
When you compare the team that played on the most dangerous surfaces last year, the Saints whom only played on grass once came away with an SIC score (an injury scale score of 81.7. The lower that score is the more injury prone your team is, the 49ers had the second lowest score in the league with a 79.0.
That SIC score generally follows playing surfaces to boot...it does show a turf vs grass correlation. So I don't know how much it matters that the 49ers have practiced on turf in previous years. In April 2025 the team started to install a 100 yard grass field to practice on....so maybe going forward that will help matters some.
There is some thinking that injuries are under reported and turf is wearing players out faster and bumps and bruises add up over the course of a year. Guys might not complain or want their name on an injury report...but they are basically not 100% regardless of what the injury report says. that is on top of the very clear bias injury reports have for turf fields.
With how regulated week practice time is...it is almost criminal to put guys you are paying millions of dollars a year for on to a turf field for the sake of convince.
Having said that...we have to remember the roster construction choices the 49ers have made and then just luck to boot.... the 49ers would have performed BETTER then the saints if Persall would not have gotten shot, and deebo did not catch the flu in week 7. Do some more what ifs and what if the 49ers did not put Feliciano on the team, a guy with a long injury history...it is not shocking he did not play at all last year he rarely can play an entire season. You can say the same for Elijah Mitchell...he has only played in something like 20 games out of 60 possible games. So was his season ending injury avoidable by the 49ers?
You stack guys like Feliciano, Mitchell, with freak things like Persall getting shot, or unlucky things like Ambry Thomas breaking his arm and missing the year and you start to get real close to league average SIC.
I get that the Strength and Conditioning folks might actually be a problem to some degree, but the 49ers are in that bottom 5 because of the front office. That really is my belief. I never rag on our guys, I love Lynch and Shanny....but the truth is...if they targeted safer players with clean injury histories, and did not sign guys with suspect injury histories....I highly doubt threads like this would exist.
Of course...we likely would not be in the playoffs as often as we have been. You start to skip guys with heavy injury history you might not get Trent Williams, or Dee Ford, Or heck...Nick Bosa...certainly not CMC.
It is easy to see the 49ers are taking calculated risks and this moves the talent needle, but can also make the injury report more volatile.
There almost certainly can be a better balance when it comes to taking risks, and I wonder if we are starting to see that...for example our injury prone punter is now gone... time will tell.....
Just one other tid-bit.....At least 60-70% of our games this year are on natural grass.... will be interesting to see if it helps this year..
[ Edited by Dshearn on Aug 19, 2025 at 1:54 AM ]