LOS ANGELES -- The Los Angeles Rams' temporary home will have a different feel this season. Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum's iconic peristyle will look the way it used to, with the cumbersome scoreboards removed after a 33-year presence. Two sleek, new video boards will instead make up the upper corners of the east end zone as part of the first phase of a three-year, $270 million renovation project taken on by USC. Roughly 10,000 fewer fans will attend each game.

That last part is also by design.

The Rams are aiming for an average attendance in the neighborhood of 70,000 for home games in 2017, after opening the stadium up to at least 80,000 fans during their first season back in L.A. Part of that was unavoidable because the new scoreboards have stripped some of the seating. But the fan experience was the major motivation behind it, the Rams say. The Coliseum, now 94 years old, can't adequately sustain crowds much larger than about 70,000. Exceeding that number can often turn into a logistical nightmare, especially at the full capacity of 90,000.

The Rams learned that in Season 1.

"The Coliseum is a massive building, the largest building in the NFL," Jake Bye, the Rams' vice president of ticket sales and premium seating, said in a phone conversation. "If you sell it to full capacity, which we did twice last year, with that comes trade-off to your fan experience."

The Rams made season tickets available to the general public on Monday, which might be a little bit telling. Last season, the Rams received 56,000 refundable season-ticket deposits in a span of three weeks. The entire allotment of 70,000 seats went to about 24,000 fans. The rest -- about 25,000 after all the smoke cleared -- remained on the waiting list, and several of them ultimately passed on the opportunity for 2017.

Available season-ticket packages, caused by non-renewals, were first made available to those on the waiting list in late April. What is being sold now is what remains. The Rams would not comment on the number of season-ticket packages remaining, but plenty of options are available, as are single-game tickets for all nine of their 2017 home games. Bye said "teams never -- or rarely, if ever -- renew at 100 percent, and we were very prepared for that." But he admits that the percentage of renewals was "lower than we anticipated."

"And I think a lot of that is more indicative of just Year 1 and just the extraordinary response we had last year," said Bye, who is coming up on his 15th season in the NFL. "You can’t fully understand that until you have something to compare that against. And seeing the normalization of the number of seats people purchase and the average seats per season-ticket member, I think that is certainly something that, though we anticipated that to some degree, I think was more prevalent than we would’ve thought."

The Rams are coming off a turbulent, disappointing season in which they fired their head coach, finished 4-12 and, for the second straight season, ranked dead last in the NFL in yards per game. They weren't just bad; they were boring. Now the Chargers are in town, playing out of the nearby, 30,000-seat StubHub Center and providing direct competition for an NFL fan base that is still finding its way.

Off the field, the Rams' best hope of rekindling interest is to improve the fan experience. That's why season-ticket deposits can be made in two installments, the first half on the spot and the rest a month later. That's why they are introducing group tickets, giving large parties discounted prices for individual games. That's why they will make only about 70,000 seats available for games, which falls in line with the capacity at their new stadium in Inglewood, California, now opening in 2020. The season before that, USC's renovations are expected to shrink the Coliseum's capacity from about 94,000 to 77,500.

"We always take the long view when making any sort of strategic decision or business decision," Bye said. "We want to look at five, 10 years down the road. We want to help a vibrant, growing fan base. We want the stadium in Inglewood to be filled. We want that experience to be world-class in every way. The decisions that we make now certainly impact that. Regardless of having more fans in the stadium ... it’s far more important to have the fans positively go there and come back again and again if we’re going to be able to build lasting relationships."

Bye said that the Rams had the largest season-ticket base last season and still have "one of the larger season-ticket bases in the NFL." Fans who purchase season tickets now will have priority for personal seat licenses at the new facility, which are expected to be made available later this year. The Rams could open up 10,000 additional seats for popular draws but will do so only if they believe the fan experience will not be compromised.

The Rams listened to a lot of feedback and pored through a lot of analytics this offseason, but experience was their most valuable tool.

"Having one year under our belt," Bye said, "we can’t emphasize how important that is in terms of making decisions that are in the best interest of NFL fans."

Now that they have a better idea of what fans want, the Rams will be "simplifying the options" in their concessions. They'll open up what used to be a private area between Gates 1 and 28 for fans to show up early, have a drink and watch NFL games throughout the league. They promise to make water more readily available, as that was an issue after the Rams packed more than 90,000 fans for their regular-season home opener last season. Finally, they have taken steps to make parking a little easier.

Bye brought up the possibility of providing partial season-ticket packages in later seasons.

He called this "a continual learning process."

"We’re going to continue to work hard," Bye said. "We have to earn people’s time and commitment to give up a Sunday at the Coliseum, and that’s what we’re focused on."