Injury stats - new offseason rules

Are there any NFL wide injury stats showing if injuries are up since the new lighter offseason training rules?

It seems to me that the 49ers must be doing something wrong with all the soft tissue injuries. It seems their philosophy is to go easy on players in the offseason to "preserve them" for the regular season actually makes it worse. If players are going full bore - sprints or pushing on other players in dynamic movements -- a la realistic movement -- then of course when they finally get to live games and have to give "110%" against under realistic situations for 72 plays they are likely to have more injuries. Right?

Or am I all wrong? Do they 9ers go to easy during the offseason? Do they have more injuries than other teams? Does it correlate more to player age or the 9ers way?

It's complicated and, ultimately, I don't have an answer.

Across all sports, soft tissue injuries and, especially, connective tissue injuries seem to be way, way, way up. Writing as a fifty year old, hamstrings used to be considered a rare bad luck injury, ruptured achilles were more of a "you can do that?!" injury. I don't think you're wrong to assume that injuries of this type are more common. And it doesn't matter which sport we look at. I know they're up in baseball and football, my friends report that they're also a huge deal in basketball and soccer.

So why?

Prior to now, I've been writing things that I'm pretty confident that I know. Now, we're switching gears and talking about things that I think. There's a big difference there.

I think the first thing to understand about professional sports is that there is no off season. Speed, quickness, strength, are all at an absolute premium in modern professional sports and they're worth millions of dollars. Gone are the lazy off seasons of yore where pro athletes had to get a job, or could go fishing for months at a time. There is no off season in professional sports anymore. The season ends, and if you don't have to seek medical help for lingering injuries, you go directly into training mode because money is at stake and everyone else is doing it. It's a ruthless zero sum game with millions at stake.

Unfortunately, connective tissue needs time to recover. This is an area where I'm really weak in terms of knowledge, but based upon what I *think* I know, tendons and ligaments tend to lag behind an athlete's ability to heal and increase muscle mass. In terms of cars, it's pretty cheap and easy to increase hp, not so cheap and easy to upgrade a transmission's ability to deal with those cheap and easy mods. The muscles get stronger, the ligaments and tendons lag behind and something has to give. The ligaments and tendons being the weak link, they give way.

This is a scourge across all professional sports. So why is it hitting the Niners so hard?

Damned if I know. What are we in now? Year eight? Clearly, we have a data set that we can work with, so Kyle's laissez faire approach to injury ("I can't guarantee if anyone will be alive on Sunday") isn't viable anymore and there are plenty of smart people in Stanford, Berkeley, and (sigh) UCLA. So why is this problem persisting and affecting us more than other teams?

Frankly, I don't know. But I do think it's fair to say that games lost to injury is a good metric with which to hold Kyle accountable. He has to take it seriously and he needs to clean it up. This isn't about dumb luck anymore. It's a problem that is unique to us. As a manager, he needs to take this problem seriously.