On August 1, 2026, Yahoo Sports reported that 49ers WR Ricky Pearsall was headed to season-ending IR for PCL surgery, with rookie WR De'Zhaun Stribling (hamstring) and RB Jordan James (fractured rib) also going down — a brutal camp on top of 2025 season-enders for Nick Bosa, George Kittle and Fred Warner (Yahoo Sports, "49ers WR Ricky Pearsall headed to season-ending IR, will have PCL surgery"). Fan reaction, catalogued by outlets like The Spun, settled on three theories: the team is "cursed," the strength and conditioning staff is failing them, or — the one you can actually test — "something is wrong with where or how they practice." That last theory has a name: Levi's Stadium.

Note on scope: the injury-report data below runs 2009–2025.

Quick take, for skimmers:

• Across 89 checkable visits (2014–2025), visiting teams' Out counts on the injury report fell by 0.35 players versus their own season baseline the week after playing at Levi's — while a 2,870-game control set of other road trips showed essentially no change (+0.02).
• The 49ers' own next-week Out counts ran lower after home games (2.25) than after road games (2.56) — the opposite of what a stadium-injury story predicts.
• SF's 2025 injury-report index — the season behind the "cursed" narrative — came in at 1.06, essentially league average.
• Bosa, Kittle and Warner combined for eight weekly injury-report appearances in the 2025 regular season. Exactly one carried an "Out" designation. Three season-ending injuries produced almost no trace on the weekly report — a preview of why that report is a blunt instrument for this question, discussed more below.

Here's the test the cursed takes never run: if the field is the problem, visiting teams should get hurt there too. Thirty-two other franchises made 95 regular-season trips to Levi's between 2014 and 2025. We can check what happened to their injury reports the following week and compare it to their own season baseline.

Test #1: Visitors to Levi's reported fewer players Out the next week, not more

Of those 95 visits, 89 had a following game to check (six came in the last week of that team's season, with no "next week" report to measure). Across those 89, the visiting team reported an average of 1.47 distinct players ruled Out on the injury report the week after playing at Levi's. That same team's season-long weekly average, excluding that post-Levi's week, was 1.83. The post-Levi's figure ran about 0.35 players lower than baseline.

That's the opposite direction of the "cursed turf" story.

To rule out a calendar artifact, we ran the identical before/after check on a control set: every other regular-season road trip in the same 2014–2025 window (2,870 visits, all non-Levi's road games with a following week to check). There, post-game Out counts averaged 1.91 against a baseline of 1.89 — a difference of essentially zero (+0.02). In other words, a generic road trip doesn't move a team's injury report at all, on average, while a trip to Levi's is associated with a lower one. With 89 Levi's data points the margin of error is real, so the honest claim is "we cannot detect a Levi's penalty on visitors — if anything the point estimate runs the other way." It is not "Levi's makes visitors healthier."

For the receipts: here are the visitors whose post-Levi's Out counts jumped the most versus their own season baseline — the teams that would be Exhibit A if the field really chewed people up:

Denver and Pittsburgh made one trip apiece. Every "elevated" team here is a tiny sample. Compare that with the most frequent visitors — the teams with a real sample size: Arizona (10 trips, −0.48), Seattle (9, −0.92), the Rams (9, −0.05), Chicago (4, −0.04) and Green Bay (4, −0.61). Every one of them sits at or below its own baseline. That's not what a stadium-level injury effect looks like.

Test #2: San Francisco's own home/road split points the same way

If Levi's specifically is where the 49ers themselves got hurt, San Francisco should have looked worse the week after home games than after road games. It didn't.

Across 2014–2025 regular-season games with a following week to check (91 home, 94 road), the 49ers reported an average of 2.25 players Out the week after a home game versus 2.56 the week after a road game. Home weeks — the Levi's weeks — again came out lower, not higher. If the practice fields at Santa Clara were quietly wrecking the roster, you'd expect the reverse.

But the 49ers were an unusually banged-up franchise — just not because of the stadium

Here's where it gets more interesting, and where we have to stay honest about what the data can and can't say. The injuries table is a weekly reporting log, not a medical record. A "player-week ruled Out" reflects what a team's PR staff filed with the league on a given Wednesday–Friday, and the NFL retired the "Probable" designation after 2015, so raw counts aren't perfectly comparable across eras. To control for that, we indexed each SF season against that same season's 32-team league average of distinct player-weeks Out.

The Candlestick-era sample (2009–2013) averaged an index of 0.68 — the 49ers reported roughly 32% fewer player-weeks Out than the league that stretch. The Levi's-era sample (2014–2025) averaged 1.24 — about 24% more than league average.

Two caveats matter:

1. The Harbaugh-era numbers (2011–2013, indices of 0.41, 0.04 and 0.45) are almost certainly a reporting artifact, not a healthy roster — a 2012 team that supposedly had one player-week Out all season isn't a credible medical claim. It's far more consistent with that regime's famously opaque injury reports. Using those seasons as a "healthy baseline" against which Levi's looks bad isn't a fair comparison.
2. Five Candlestick seasons versus twelve Levi's seasons is a small pre-period even ignoring the artifact above — not enough to hang a stadium effect on.

What the table does show cleanly is that the 49ers' recent reporting — 2019 (1.50), 2020 (2.28), 2021 (1.53), 2022 (1.54), 2024 (1.61) — ran well above league average. 2025, the season behind the "cursed" discourse, indexed at 1.06 — essentially league average.

That 2025 number is worth sitting with, because it's a direct rebuttal to the framing in the lede: as noted above, Bosa, Kittle and Warner appeared on SF's 2025 regular-season injury report (weeks 1–18) in only 3, 4 and 1 weeks respectively — and of those eight combined appearances, exactly one (Warner, Week 7) carried an "Out" designation; the rest were blank or "Questionable." Three season-ending injuries, one weekly "Out" entry between them. An IR move is a roster transaction, and it doesn't have to show up as a weekly status flag at all — which is exactly why a "brutal camp" narrative built on season-ending injuries can coexist with a perfectly average weekly injury-report index. The two data sources are measuring different things.

What the data supports

• Visiting teams show no sign of being harmed by playing at Levi's. Their next-week Out counts ran 0.35 players below their own season baseline across 89 checkable trips, while a control set of 2,870 non-Levi's road games showed essentially no change (+0.02).
• The 49ers' own next-week Out counts ran lower after home games than after road games (2.25 vs. 2.56) — again the opposite of a stadium-injures-players story.
• The 49ers have, since 2019, reported more player-weeks Out than the average NFL team most seasons. That's a real, citable pattern — but it's a pattern about the 49ers as an organization (coaching, medical staff, roster construction, opponents, or bad luck), not about Levi's. Both natural experiments above point away from the stadium.
• 2025's SF index was 1.06 — near league average for weekly Out reports, even though it's the season the "cursed" narrative is built on, and even though three of its marquee players (Bosa, Kittle, Warner) went down for the year.

We can't say Levi's turf is biomechanically safe — the injury report doesn't measure that. We can't grade the medical staff — same limitation. And with a thin, reporting-distorted pre-Levi's sample, we wouldn't stake much on the raw era-over-era jump either. What the data does support is narrower and still useful: the specific popular claim — that Levi's is a place where players get hurt at unusually high rates — doesn't survive contact with the natural experiment sitting in the schedule. Ninety-five visits, and the field looks, if anything, marginally kinder to guests than a random road trip.

The 49ers may still have an injury problem. It just doesn't live at the stadium.

Method notes. Levi's home games were pulled from schedules where home_team='SF', stadium="Levi's Stadium", game_type='REG', season BETWEEN 2014 AND 2025 — filtering on the stadium field itself naturally excludes the three 2020 SF "home" games actually played at State Farm Stadium during the wildfire-smoke displacement (vs. BUF, WAS, SEA). Injury-report counts are distinct gsis_ids with report_status='Out' for the given team/week from the injuries table. A team's "next week" is the nearest subsequent week (by schedules) in which it played; visits with no subsequent game that season were dropped from the before/after comparison. Season baselines average all playing weeks for that team-season except the post-visit week. League-average figures average the same weekly Out counts across all 32 teams for that season. The Bosa/Kittle/Warner appearance counts are restricted to regular-season weeks 1–18 of 2025, excluding postseason entries. The injuries table covers 2009–current; there are no 2026 rows, so every figure here is drawn from 2009–2025 data even though the news hook is from August 2026.