Not long after the final whistle blew in Auburn’s Music City Bowl loss to Maryland, Auburn quarterback Payton Thorne met with the media for the final time of the 2023 season.

Thorne, who had struggled against Maryland’s defense, was looking forward to quickly turning the page and focusing on how he and Auburn’s offense could get better in 2024, which would be his second season on The Plains and the first he’d get with a full offseason under his belt.

He was excited for that.

“Honestly, I’ve already started to turn the page, to be honest with you, to next year and what we have going on next year,” Thorne said. “I’ll watch the film and talk with coach, but I’m excited about the future.”

However, before any of that could transpire, Thorne hinted to there being a bigger fish to fry inside the Tigers’ locker room — one that Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze alluded to during his postgame press conference minutes before.

“I think our staff and our young men — starting with our staff, starting with me — have got to create a standard of the way we consistently work, consistently compete, and figure out how to be a true team,” Freeze said following the Tigers’ season-ending loss to the Terrapins. “That is my goal in 2024.”

In short, despite having just played an entire football season together, Freeze felt like Auburn wasn’t quite a “true team.”

Somewhere down the line, there was a disconnect, specifically in terms of player-led leadership, which is something Freeze and the Tigers have set out to correct with their culture council this spring.

Thorne agreed that was lacking last fall.

“Completely agree with coach,” Thorne said that chilly night in Nashville. “We did not have enough of (player-led leadership) this year by any means. It showed.”

As a result, Thorne wanted to see it be addressed, even if it meant taking things into his own hands.

“That’s going to be one of my main focuses when we get back is getting the guys together — the guys who need to be there,” Thorne said. “If it takes five hours, it takes five hours but we need to sit down and say, ‘What do we need to be and what do we want our future to look like.’”

There was a part of Thorne’s comment about his plan that stuck out above the rest. Whether he meant to or not, Thorne slipped it in there: “The guys who need to be there.”

Thorne’s assertion seemed to indicate his frustration with some of the guys in Auburn’s locker room.

That same evening, Auburn tight end Rivaldo Fairweather offered a similar message as he told reporters there were “a lot of loose leashes around here on this team that we need to get rid of.”

Reading between the lines of Thorne and Fairweather’s comments, it sounded as though some players weren’t living up to the standard.

However, it now sounds as though most of those “loose leashes” have been weeded out.

“I was thinking about this yesterday or the day before, like, all the guys that you would get frustrated with, like, ‘Why don’t you want to be here? Why don’t you want to workout?,’ stuff like that, most of those guys are gone,” Thorne told reporters Thursday. “So that has been really refreshing.”

Nowadays, Thorne says everyone is eager to put in the work.

“I feel like most of the guys — almost all of the guys — that are here now want to be here and they want to workout and they want to play well on the field,” Thorne says. “The energy has been off the charts at practice so far.”

Even the youngest guys on Auburn’s roster — the early enrollees ― have taken to the standard quickly.

“Those young guys, the early enrollees, have been great because they’re a lot of good guys,” Thorne said. “Coach Freeze has recruited those guys for a while and they’re good people, they work hard and they’re the guys you want in your program.”