The 49ers’ handling of the surprising decision to hold running back Christian McCaffrey (calf, Achilles tendon) out of Monday night’s game against the Jets raises many questions, especially since running back Jordan Mason said he learned that he would start on Fridaya day before the 49ers listed McCaffrey as questionable.

We asked the league what the situation is.

“We will not comment,” a spokesman for the PFT league said by email.

It is unclear whether this means that everything is OK. If so, why not say so?

Whatever the league does (or doesn’t do), the situation exposes a very real problem with injury reporting rules. It’s easy to follow them. And it’s even easier to manipulate them. When in doubt, make the player questionable and say nothing more until he’s inactive.

While it is unrealistic to require teams to announce their inactive players before warmups, the league could come up with something that sends a clearer message about a player’s potential unavailability.

Maybe the league doesn’t need to do that. Maybe the 49ers broke the rules by not downgrading McCaffrey to questionable. Even if his status was truly questionable and not doubtful on Friday, he surely became questionable at some point before he was cut. The moment the 49ers realized McCaffrey was on the wrong side of 50-50, the downgrade should have happened.

It is not our job to come up with potential changes to a flawed set of rules, especially at a time when gambling is legal and the NFL is profiting greatly from it. At the very least, the league must remove the ability of teams to label a starting player as questionable and deactivate him without warning just 90 minutes before kickoff.

For a wide range of betting and fantasy football games, 90 minutes before kick-off is far too late – especially for the last game of the weekend.