Knights came under fire after his side suffered a defeat at the hands of Melbourne in round 15 with that pressure set to lift several more notches after the Dons failed to get the job done against the bottom-placed side at Etihad Stadium.
“I’ve just got to be able to absorb that and be resilient,” Knights said.
"I fully accept the criticism that will come my way ... I will take everything on the chin about our football as I should.
“[It’s] similar to last week. Front up, do what I need to do, work with the players. It’s not about me - it’s about the Essendon Football Club and the players."
Knights' tenure at Windy Hill was questioned heavily in the media in the lead-up to Saturday's game, but he wouldn't use that as an excuse for the sub-par performance.
"That would be a cop out I would have thought," he said.
"We still trained well, we still had our preparation - I'm sure there was a bit more external [pressure] than usual but that's part of this competition - you've just got to be resilient enough and tough enough to deal with that and we certainly weren't."
The loss, his side's sixth in succession, was a turnover-ridden affair punctuated by poor skill execution and missed tackles.
"Earlier in the year we were pretty strong in tackling, we were pretty strong in hard-ball gets and we got blown away in both tonight," Knights lamented.
"I thought a lot of our tackles were with our fingers and our arms rather than our shoulders.
"I thought our forward entries were difficult if you were playing in the forward line.
"We had a lot of opportunities going inside 50 but didn't capitalise. We had a lot of easy shots we didn't capitalise on. There were a few areas that were certainly well short of the mark this evening and we got our fair whack."
Knights conceded the loss put his side in as big a hole as he'd experienced in his time at the club, but he vowed to find a way out.
"I think the most important thing from this point is that it's about respect for the rest of the year," he said.
"We've just got to get some respect back and play some football at a much better level than we have been.
"Confidence is one of those words that they use that just sits up there, but no one really knows what it is.
"What it comes out of is preparation and working for each other and great ethic on the track. We've just got to go back to the track and train hard and work hard and potentially look for a couple of little circuit breakers that might get us in a better frame of mind for next week."
