Players affected by the virus who took the field on Saturday night included Robert Murphy, Shaun Higgins, Ryan Hargrave, Dale Morris, Lindsay Gilbee, Brodie Moles and Liam Picken.
“It was no excuse at all,” Eade said after the defeat.
“They were all 100 per cent going in.”
Adam Cooney and Ben Hudson were laid low enough to be kept on the sidelines, but Eade said their likely return next week along with Jarrod Harbrow (corked leg) and Jarrad Grant (soreness) would not help unless the side's mentality changed.
“If there’s no effort or not enough effort, it doesn’t matter who you put in,” he said.
“We’ve played with six players out and won. It doesn’t matter [about] the names. It’s what’s inside the jumper.
“I don’t know what I put [tonight] down to. We were obviously beaten by an extremely good side but it was embarrassing, it was humiliating, and it was very unlike us.
“We’ll take stock of it, analyse it and we’ve got to answer it in the right way next week.”
Eade said you could “take your pick” on what went wrong against the Cats, as they motored away to their best win over the Dogs in their head-to-head history.
“There were six different aspects we were poor at. The only positive you could get was there were probably two or three players that played okay,” he said.
“There was no other positive strength of ours. We got smashed in centre square clearances, contested ball, use of the ball.”
Eade named Tom Williams, Daniel Giansiracusa and Murphy as the Dogs’ best players.
Williams suffered a few knocks and experienced pain in his neck and shoulder but Eade said his condition was not as serious as Easton Wood (hamstring) and Higgins (calf).
Wood is expected to miss a fortnight while Higgins could miss 2-3 weeks.
Eade said defender Brian Lake was fine despite receiving treatment on his hip throughout the game.
