The Crows have been beset by injuries following a horror pre-season at West Lakes that saw a steady procession of players heading to the medical rooms.
There was just nine points in it at three-quarter time at Etihad Stadium, but Craig could only look on as his tiring charges were brushed aside by the Saints on their way to a 47-point win.
"We've just got too many players at the moment who are not physically conditioned to be able to play out the full game," Craig said.
"We just need to keep pushing them and identify who those players are [who are underdone], which I've already done. The challenge is to be able to put some more work into them in a competition season and that's the balance because recovery is so important.
"I'm talking about more conditioning when a lot of the players need recovery to be able to come up for the next week. When we get in that scenario it's important that guys continue to push themselves in the last quarter though to try and get some conditioning out of the game as well.
"I'm starting to see some signs of the type of footy that we want to play and I'm seeing for longer periods of time so that's encouraging for us."
Craig was unwilling to divulge the number of players he feels are incapable of running out a game, but Nathan Bock's name was added to that list when he limped to the bench with a groin injury in the third term.
There are no reinforcements waiting in the wings in the SANFL according to Craig, who pledged to get to the bottom of Adelaide's injury-wrecked season.
"We're in the process of looking at all that," he said.
"Some of it is bad luck I would say, like Andy Otten doing an ACL at training. Patrick Dangerfield falling on his wrist and breaking a bone in the game against the Western Bulldogs has got nothing to do with our [fitness] program, so you tick those off, but we need to look at every situation and be very diligent in all of that.
"It's not put-your-head-in-the-sand stuff - if there's changes to be made in terms of our conditioning and management and so forth we need to be very open-minded about that and we will be."
Craig felt an emotional week for the club that saw Simon Goodwin announce his intention to retire at the end of the season and acrimony surrounding Tyson Edwards' own retirement plans had not affected the group on the field.
He pledged to continue to fight out the season despite finals being off the agenda.
"It's important that we don't give the season away at any stage and we won't," he said.
"It's important that we try new things … we need to make sure that we continue to coach them and educate them and get them to learn as much as they possibly can.
"There's still a lot to look forward to for us for the season. It's really important that we just don't give it away because if you give it away everything else sort of goes as well.
"The time is too important for us."
