Maybe to put this a way that won’t make everyone mad.
“NFL tells teams players to not try and confuse things when reporting eligible.”
They tried to get cute and send 3 people for 1 person reporting. They succeeded in causing confusion just as they planned it just happened to be the ref that ended up confused.
This kind of reminds me when I was small and decided to rename myself from my nick name to my dads name…. Which was also my actual name I just didn’t know it….