Days after the Eagles confirmed their plans to seek AFL draft assistance, the third wooden spoon of their existence was officially confirmed in Saturday's 83-point loss to Melbourne.
West Coast have won just one game this season and 11 in total over the past four seasons.
There was little for first-year coach McQualter to salvage from the dire outing at Marvel Stadium, and he let his players know as much in their meeting post-game.
"We're not tough enough at all as a football club, as a football team at the moment," McQualter said.
"That's got nothing to do with age. That's something that we just can't accept."
The Eagles may go old-school and get the mouthguards out at training this week.
"We might have to, because at the moment when you get performances like that, you have to improve them via training, and that might be what we have to do," McQualter.
"It's intent. It's desire. We've got to put the right plans in place and put the people in the right places.
"There's too many times where it's not at the level required."
In a scrappy first half at Marvel Stadium, the Eagles had their moments.
But a 10-goal third quarter from the Demons broke the game apart.
"They scored certainly in that quarter, but clearly at the moment the gap between our best and our worst is far too great, and we can't handle it," he said.
"Teams have momentum against us and the scoreboard just flows too easily, so we've just got to keep finding ways to do it better."
West Coast are without Harley Reid, Oscar Allen, Jake Waterman, Elliot Yeo and Bo Allan for the rest of the season and finish their campaign with tough clashes against Adelaide, the Western Bulldogs and Sydney.
"We have to get something out of it. We have to be better than we were today," McQualter said.
"Because we've got three tough opponents coming up. We have to challenge our team, our coaches, our staff, our club that we still need to improve, clearly, and the next three weeks is more opportunity to do that.
"We'll just review this game the same way as we do.
"We'll get really clear on what we're going after, but we need to close the gap on our best and our worst. That's the big thing we're going to focus on the next three weeks."
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