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Despite the open date, East Carolina coach Blake Harrell met with the media on Monday during his usual weekly time slot to talk all things Pirate athletes.  The Pirates are coming off a 42-9 win over North Carolina Central, improving to 2-2 on the season as the bye week arrives, with conference play around the corner.  Below is everything Harrell had to say, along with video of the press conference at the bottom of the article. OPENING STATEMENT "Morning. Always a good Monday morning when you get a win in Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium. Just really thank you to the fans who came out. I think we had 43,000 fans. That's awesome, awesome atmosphere, especially for that game and just what they created in there, the home field advantage. And it was good to be in there with our fans and watch our guys go to work, especially in the first half. Thought we did some better things. I think we're moving in the right direction, but just can't be more happy about our fan base and what they're doing inside there and and all the things our administration is doing to create a special atmosphere for game day, from the fireworks to the halftime, to pregame, to the giveaways, all those things, so just thank you to those people that make that happen.  "As I mentioned to our football team, I think we're moving in the right direction, I think we've done some good things, and as we talked this morning, we still have a long ways to go. It's the first four games. If you divide your season into different aspects, you can say it's the first third of your season. You got two thirds of your season. In the month of October, we're getting ready to come up on four games with a stretch of Rice at home for homecoming, at UAB, at Memphis, and then back home for Temple, and then you'll start the final third of that in November. But we got to go clean some things up and continue to play our best football. And most teams don't play their best football in September. You want to be playing your best football when times roll around in October, November, when games matter and when things are on the line for it. So we got to take it one step at a time, one play at a time. But every single day this week, we got to push to get better and improve, and we got a lot of areas for that.  "Big focus this morning is Pirates got to play clean. Pirates don't beat Pirates, and we got to clean that piece up. And then we focused on a lot of situational football. Sometimes your situational football can get lost because you do that in preseason camp. So we were working, just right there at the end in practice, two-minute situations, taking a safety at the end of the game, six seconds on the clock, air ball, throwing the ball ball away with five seconds on the clock. All those situations that could come up to end the game that you have coached up, you have reviewed, and may have been on during preseason camp, that you don't get an opportunity to review every week. Kickoff after a safety, punt after a safety, the free kick rule, which I haven't seen come up in college football yet, so those are just good reminders for our football team, our staff. They could come up over the next eight games, so we got to be prepared for that, and keep pushing forward on things we're doing.  "Thought we had some good individual performances. I thought the first half, we did some really positive things. I'd like to see us put that first drive in the end zone. Thought we did a really good job moving the ball down the field, offensively. Defensively, the first play of the game. We wanted to be extremely aggressive, and we were, and just miss a tackle out wide. I'd like to have that one back, and you know, have a three and out, and put our offense in better shape there. But the defense responded to that, held them to three points, and then offensively took it down, got all the way down the one yard line. Emory's trying to make an extra play, get into the box, and let the ball loose. I think anytime you're going down, you can kind of see the elbow coming out on the ball carrier, and the ball gets away from you. So if we're in traffic, we got to double up and get two hands on it. So got to do a better job with that. But overall, in the first half, thought we did some really good things cleanly. In the second half, we let some things stack up negatively that affected that.  "So we got to respond there in the second half in a better way and make sure we go finish the game the right way, and get out of there feeling a little better about that, so we can get some other guys in the game as well. But, bye week, we'll focus on us the first of the week here. As we get to midweek, or later in the week, we'll start to focus on our next opponent, Rice, and just being 1-0 against Rice. Rice is a an option football team, mostly out of the gun. They got a quarterback, that transferred to them from UCF. He was at Miami before that. South Georgia kid who does an exceptional job back there. I think they're averaging like 250 on the ground. I think first game they had 500 on the ground. I think another 250 or 300 this past weekend, so they can run the football, and then defensively, they fly around, and you're going to look at the record, and I don't think that's really who they are right now. You turn on the film, and they catch your attention pretty quick because they play the game the right way. They fly around on both sides of the football, so certainly going to focus on us, and then as the week goes on, we'll get to them. But just day by day and step by step, making sure we're getting ready to go finish this thing the right way. Rest of the season. So this time we open up for questions."