Payton Thorne is approaching being Auburn’s starting quarterback like he approaches being a guest at the dinner table.

“You always want to leave a place better than you found it,” Thorne told reporters Wednesday. “Whether that’s when you sit down and eat at a table, or when you show up and play football games.”

Thorne admitted to reporters Wednesday that his transfer out of Michigan State came without much warning. Everything happened so quick that had you asked Thorne about leaving East Lansing a week before he entered the portal, he might’ve looked at you like you had three heads.

But after talking with Auburn’s first-year head coach Hugh Freeze, coming to Auburn was a “no-brainer” for Thorne.

Will Hewlett, Thorne’s private quarterback trainer, alluded to such comments in a recent interview with AL.com.

“I don’t know necessarily that he wasn’t going to be the starter at Michigan State,” Hewlett told AL.com. “But I think he just needed a fresh start and kind of a different environment.”

A different environment meant coming south to a town of less than 80,000 people. It was a step up from East Lansing, which is home to just less than 47,000 people. But both places, however, are significantly smaller than Thorne’s hometown of Naperville, Ill, which sits just west of Chicago with nearly 150,000 residents.

Thorne says he and his family frequently vacationed along Florida’s Emerald Coast, which meant driving through Alabama. Those experiences are about all Thorne had in the Yellowhammer State.

Nonetheless, Thorne has felt at home at Auburn — a place that makes it easy for one to get a hearty helping of southern hospitality. Auburn’s newly named starting quarterback had got a taste of that firsthand.

“I love it down here, this is my kind of place, my kind of people down here. Everyone’s been very welcoming and just good people. People are just nicer down here,” Thorne said. “A lot of people say that and it feels like everybody is friendly, feels like everybody goes to church, which is what I believe in. It’s been great.”

Obviously, for a guy like Thorne, who has his sights set on a career in the NFL, the community in which he’s living in is just a small part of the big picture.

If we’re calling it like it is, Auburn fans don’t care a ton about what Thorne thinks about the town. They know his time in an Auburn uniform is limited.

And the good news is Thorne knows that too.

“It revolves around winning. And there’s a lot of things that go into winning,” Thorne said. “But when you win, people remember you. When you win a lot of games, people really remember you.”

Again, with the goal of leaving a place better than he found it, Thorne is looking to win a lot of games in his time with the Tigers, who have suffered back-to-back losing seasons for the first time since the 1998 and 1999 seasons.

Fortunately for Auburn fans, Thorne immediately saw the potential to win on The Plains.

When Thorne and his father, who is a highly regarded college football coach in the Division III ranks, visited Auburn, they stayed for nine hours, Thorne said.

“A lot of that was watching film and talking through the offense,” Thorne said. “Seeing the players that we have and that was all very encouraging.”

But playing for offensive minds like Freeze and first-year offensive coordinator Philip Montgomery was attractive in its own right.

Thorne isn’t ignorant to the fact that Freeze, at one point last fall, was down to his fourth string quarterback at Liberty. But still, he and the Flames still managed to find their way into the win column. Meanwhile, between his time at Baylor and then at Tulsa, Montgomery was at the helm of some explosive offenses.

It all mattered to Thorne as he weighed his options out of the transfer portal.

“It’s fun for me to play for an offensive head coach and to have a lot of people devoted to quarterback and quarterback development and all that stuff,” Thorne said.

Such wasn’t the case at Michigan State under a defensive-minded guy like Mel Tucker.

As such, playing for a guy like Freeze is enough to leave a quarterback salivating.

But that doesn’t mean Thorne isn’t aware of or is turning a cheek to the expectations of him.

“It’s a big responsibility. We have a huge fan base. We have a lot of people that put a lot of time into this football program; a lot of people that care a lot about us. I take that responsibility very seriously, and I care about it more than anybody,” Thorne said Thursday.

“I definitely understand the position that I’m in, and I’m blessed and thankful for that. And I think the best way to deal with that pressure is just to, for me and what I believe in, is I believe that my Heavenly Father’s in control and if I turn everything over to him, then I’ll be at peace with whatever happens as long as I do everything I can. I’m going to work as hard as I can.”

And of course, the hope is that, like the dinner table, Thorne leaves the Auburn football program better than he found it.