OXNARD, Calif. – The Cowboys defense was a big winner from their preseason opener against the Seahawks, holding Seattle to just 76 yards of offense on their final seven drives of the game.

As is the case with any preseason game however, there will be things that need to be improved. Cowboys head coach Brian Schottenheimer discussed two in his press conference on Monday, with the first being the overall play of his special teams unit. He described it as "not good enough" and "not the standard."

"Our mantra is get back to basics," Schottenheimer said."Got to pay more attention to detail. Very, very disappointed in how we lost contain. Very disappointed in how we gave up kick side leverage. And the ball's supposed to be kept on your right shoulder? Keep it on your right shoulder. The ball's supposed to be on your left shoulder? Keep it on your left shoulder."

"And then we did a terrible job of communicating non-verbally on the coverage teams. 'Hey, I'm the ball player. I'm the outside player. I'm the capper.' Didn't do a good enough job of that. So we had a long special teams meeting today. It's going to be a big part of our emphasis because it wasn't good enough."

The Cowboys gave up a combined 144 yards on six combined punt and kickoff returns, and the Seahawks average starting field position on offense was their own 42 yard line.

The second area that Schottenheimer wants to see cleaned up is their blocking along the offensive line, with the Cowboys rushing for just 40 net yards against the Seahawks in the first half last Saturday.

"We didn't block very well in that first half," Schottenheimer said. "We weren't very efficient running the football. Some of that is the fact that they're pretty big and stout in there, and we didn't have a lot of perimeter runs up to get the ball on the edge. I would say it was probably an eight iron that we showed in the game."

Schottenheimer will likely stick with a similar club in their next game against the Cardinals when it comes to the play calls on offense, but hopes that his team is able to make the proper adjustments to open things up for all the running backs.

"You looked at certain guys like Malik Davis that I talked about, his ability to move the chains," Schottenheimer said. "[Israel Abanikanda] ran really, really hard. But there really wasn't in the first half, a lot there for guys like Jaydon [Blue] and Phil [Mafah]. They were battling uphill a little bit. We figured it out in the second half, but that'll be a big part of what we're trying to do throughout this week in some of the padded work against the Saints and ourselves heading into Arizona. We need to move people better."

Their first opportunity to get towards making that adjustment comes this afternoon in a joint practice against the New Orleans Saints. What does Schottenheimer want to see on Tuesday?

"Carry over a little bit from what we did with the Rams…" Schottenheimer said. "It'll be very similar to what we did with the Rams. Few less reps, since [the Saints] have another joint [practice] coming up, but you'll see a lot of the same situational work, some of the special teams stuff that we need to get done."

From there, the Cowboys will have just one remaining practice in Oxnard before traveling to Arizona to play the Cardinals on Saturday, and returning to the Star in Frisco for the remainder of training camp.