More news continues to filter out from the fallout of Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s scary collapse last Monday, and the more we learn, the worse it looks for the NFL.

A damning ESPN report published Monday night, exactly a week after Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest on the field during a game against the Bengals, documented the confusion that ensued in the following minutes – with mixed messaging coming from the league that eventually forced the teams to take action when no one else would.

“The ambulance left the field … and it was crystal clear from everyone’s perspective that we could not play,” a top team official told the site. “The only chaos was coming … from the command center.”

With several moments having elapsed since Hamlin’s frightening collapse, Bills coach Sean McDermott, Bengals coach Zac Taylor, referee Shawn Smith and a few others stood in a circle with Dawn Aponte, the league’s chief football administrator. Aponte was in communication with Troy Vincent, executive vice president of football operations, and a number of other top NFL officials in the league’s command center, and it appeared the league was trying to pressure Aponte into getting the game back on.

“The Lord himself could come down, and we were not going to play again,” an anonymous, high-ranking official from one of the two teams told ESPN. “She [Aponte] was getting pressure. She was not getting consistent and direct messaging that she deserved to receive.

“Whatever crazy nonsense she was getting, man, she held it. She held it strong.”

It became clear as time went on that neither the players or coaches on the two teams involved had any interest in restarting the game, but it took over an hour for the league to officially pull the plug. It was a “ground-up” decision to postpone the game, the report read, with the two teams being the clear engine behind the move.

“The league did not cancel game,” the official said. “The Bills and Bengals cancelled the game.”

The reporting again brings into question exactly how pure the league’s intentions were with a possibly cataclysmic situation unfolding on the field. During the chaos, ESPN announcer Joe Buck reported live on the broadcast that the teams were told they had “five minutes” to warm up before the game restarted with Hamlin still down on the field.

Vincent, in a conference call after the game was postponed, denied the five-minute report, saying: “It never crossed our mind to talk about warming up to resume play. That’s ridiculous. That’s insensitive.”

Buck has not backed off his claim, saying ESPN rules expert John Parry was in constant communication with the league office and the directive came from there.

“If what I said on national TV with the eyes of the world watching was wrong in the view of the league, I would have been corrected – immediately,” Buck said, per ESPN. “And I was not.

“We were on the air for another 40 minutes and no one corrected the idea that the game would resume. No one.”

Parry, too, said the ESPN statement was “accurate.”

Zac Taylor did say that any directive to restart the game and begin warming up never got as far as the coaches, who appeared adamant from the first second that they were not playing again that night. “There was no push for anything to happen,” Taylor said.

Still, the anonymous official shouldered the blame on Vincent, who the source appears to believe was behind the scenes trying to get the game started up again – to no avail.

“The league screws this s–t up because Troy Vincent screws this stuff up,” the official said. “That’s the wrong person in the wrong position at the absolute wrong time. … He wants to be the hero, but he will never take accountability. That’s him to a T.”