Kyle Whittingham Post Game Press Conference

Utah football head coach Kyle Whittingham addressed the media after Utah’s 36-23 win over Arizona at Rice-Eccles Stadium on Saturday night.

"It's good to get back on track after the disappointment last week and get a win. I'm proud of our guys. We're a pretty decent football team and if we can stop the self-inflicted stuff … We like to create tough situations for ourselves and we need to get that fixed.

"Things that need to get cleaned up, penalties, we had a lot of false starts. A lot of those were caused by {Arizona} barking out commands on the defensive line. Disconcerting signals, that's what it's called, and they were not calling it so we have to handle that. If we can get them cleaned up, we have a pretty good team, but we'll see.

"Defensively, we played well. We got a lot of takeaways, three interceptions. We allowed too many big plays over the top. It was evident tonight that we need to do a better job against the deep ball. They connected on far too many of those.

"Offensively, we had good balance, passing and rushing for over 200 yards. We need to have a higher completion percentage but in the second half our offense got into a rhythm which we need to see happen.

"I thought we won the special teams battle. That's who we are and we had not been doing that the last couple weeks so it was good to be back on track. Mitch Wishnowsky did a great job punting and Andy Phillips did a nice job kicking. Our kickoff return game got going, something we haven't really seen this year, so it was nice to get good field position there.

"Overall, it's a nice win. We're probably tied with two or three teams in the Pac-12 South. I don't know what happened tonight but I know we are at least tied for first."

Running back Armand Shyne suffered a bad looking knee injury in the game.

"Armand doesn't look good and that's a huge issue for us right now. Troy McCormick was out, Zack Moss was out and now Armand is out. It could be season-ending but we'll know more in the next 24-48 hours, so that's a big blow for us."

Utah struggled to start the football game but dominated in the second half.

"We didn't make any more major adjustments defensively. The start of the game was awful giving up a 75-yard bomb. The defense was actually playing pretty well. We talked about changing the snap count to combat the move call. That fixed things but we still had a couple in the second half show up. We had better execution and Cory Butler-Byrd is a big-time playmaker. We need to do that start to finish rather than the second half."

The game really turned when Utah got the safety in the north end zone.

"It was a huge momentum-changing play and we had to burn the timeout because no one asked if we would take a penalty. Who would accept a one-yard penalty? It's great to have Lowell Lotulelei back and Pasoni Tasini at the level he's playing at."

Quarterback Troy Williams ran the football quite a bit at the end of the game

"You have to do whatever you can do to win the game. No concern in him running the ball. He's a good runner and we don't run him enough and need to get him more involved in the run game."

The win over Arizona was Whittingham’s 100th career win.

"I've had the opportunity to have a lot of good players and a lot of good teams. I appreciate them all and I've been here as the head coach for 12 years and it just means we've had a lot of good players come through this program."

Video of Whittingham’s press conference can be found here on the Block U Facebook page.