How do you want your team to lose?

Question prompted (hat tip: Extreme Skins) by a Virginia Pilot article titled: Gibbs: Despite trouncing, Skins' attitude good. The article itself doesn't spend a whole lot of time on the team's attitude beyond the first couple paragraphs, instead it relives the horror that was Sunday, but the title alone leaps out at you. Should the Redskins have a good attitude after a 52-7 drubbing in which they were hopelessly outclassed? I don't know the answer to that.

It is my understanding that there are two competing philosophies here. 1) If your team loses bad you want to see a fiery coach, angry players, and perhaps even some accountability with drastic action taken against starters, coaches, etc. that indicates the team will not tolerate failure. Or, competing, 2) status quo or acceptance and moving on is preferable because maintaining esprit de corps is necessary. If you espouse to 1) you fear team apathy. An accepter of 2) fears mutiny.

I don't know where I'm at on that, or where I should be. On personal preference, I lean towards 1) because I happen to be a huge proponent of accountability, and if we have to lose I'd rather people lose and pay for it than lose and simply hang about with their heads held low. But I also very much fear team mutiny. Reality probably dictates that the correct balance of motivating your players and supporting them is not so cut-and-dry as to be categorized simply as above. The coach who finds the sweet spot between the two will be the kind who gets the most out of his players and, thus, wins football games.

With that analysis concluded, or begun, or whatever, I should note that viewing competing coaching strategies as malleable and existing on a logical continuum is the kind of reasoned and careful analysis that has absolutely no place on this website. I demand from reader(s) that they identify themselves immediately as either supporters of fire-breathing madmen coaches who call their players names or else they side up more with the father figure loving coach who comforts his players family with kind but soft words of encouragement. If you land somewhere in between these two distinct coaching philosophies, then just lie. I want hyperbole.

More important question that I'd like answered, though, is how is Coach Gibbs playing this? It appears as if he's going behind door #2; we lost but it is acceptable because the Patriots are so good, the game:

Etc. But as the article points out later, it didn't always used to be this way, emphasis added: I am not suggesting we bench Jason Campbell.