CHARLOTTE — Jaycee Horn hasn't been gone long.

So when he walks into the Panthers locker room this morning, for the first time since agreeing to his life-changing/not game-changing contract extension, everything's going to look almost exactly the same.

Everything except for one small space, about a foot high and maybe 3 feet across, about 8 feet off the floor.

The nameplate immediately to the left of his locker, the one that for the last year read 54 Shaq Thompson — and the year before that 0 Brian Burns — has been removed. The equipment staff loosened the bolts and removed it Wednesday afternoon just after 4 p.m., when the turning of the league calendar made Thompson a free agent. The unadorned patch of black paneling under the logo — it doesn't look like anything other than empty — is a stark and tangible reminder of how things have changed and what that change represents.

By being a first-round pick and getting this contract extension, Horn joins defensive tackle Derrick Brown at a unique place in time, on a team and in a locker room in transition. They're still so young (Horn's 25, Brown's 26), but it's their defense now, and that's an evolution that takes time to process.

"It's different now," Horn acknowledged, simply and yet profoundly.

It's also what comes with the passage of time in the NFL. When he was a rookie, Thompson was shepherded by Luke Kuechly and Thomas Davis. They had learned the lessons from guys like Julius Peppers and Jon Beason, who learned them from Dan Morgan, who learned them from Sam Mills.

That's how it works in this league. There's always a next. And now, it's Horn's turn, along with Brown.

"Oh yeah," Horn said with a subtle shake of his head. "I mean, we've seen those guys, like Shaq, the Donte Jacksons, the Brian Burns. For me, coming in, I just watched those guys lead. And seeing how the team looked at them for everything, for leadership. You know, it's crazy to just fast forward to now, that me and Derrick are in those positions.

"But we know what comes with it, and I feel like we know what needs to be done for us to get the best out of the defense, working together. So now that we're in this position, we've just got to do it, and do it the right way, like the guys like Shaq Thompson that came before us. You know how he led around the building. So we had a perfect example. And now we're just going to do it."

His mentor might not be here, but the lessons remain.

This is not a story about Shaq Thompson, though. It's Jaycee Horn's day, and he's going to come in, sign the papers, become wealthy in a new way, talk to the coaches, and then get about the business of being Jaycee Horn.

But it's also impossible to tell the story of Horn's ascendant leadership of this team without talking about the guy who taught him to lead, in the same way all of their origin stories trace to the previous generation.

As soon as Horn got here, a celebrated top-10 pick with a family legacy, the expectations were high. So Thompson made sure he knew from that start that someday, they'd get even higher.

That's why, during his rookie season, Thompson steered Horn in from the periphery and into the middle of a huddle of much older men.

"I remember being a rookie, and Shaq just grabbed me and made me address the defense," Horn said. "Like you have to do this, you're going to have to do this one day when you're the leader of this defense. He used to do that a lot, not just to me but to different players."

When Horn got to the center of that circle, he did something he never does on a football field.

"I froze, man," he recalled. "I can't even tell you what I was talking about. I was just talking, man. I can't even remember what I said. I just remember being nervous. It was nerve-wracking, especially as a young guy. You're in front of all these grown men, and you got Shaq Thompson telling you to talk to the defense about practice today, tell them how we could be better, and then break us down.

"But you do it for times like this when you are in that position to lead the defense for the Panthers. You've got to be ready, to hold everybody accountable."

But there were other lessons along the way, most of them learned by example. The way to prepare your mind by studying, even if that means supplemental Tuesday film study, bringing younger guys along. The way to prepare your body by both pushing it and allowing it to recover. And as Horn learned some of those lessons in painful ways — a broken foot ending his rookie season after just three games — he watched Thompson process it in real time.

And the lesson he learned was that there's always a next something.

As he was in the training room after getting surgery, there was a parade of well-wishers, people feeling bad, and maybe even feeling sorry for Horn — who might have even been feeling sorry for himself. Thompson's message to him that day was a quick one.

"My spirits were down a little bit," Horn admitted. "Shaq just came in there like, 'You'll be all right, pick your head up.' Kind of like it was nothing to dwell on when everybody was coming like patting me on the back like, 'Oh man, it's going to be OK.' He just walked by like, 'You'll be all right, man.' That's kind of his personality, how he attacked everything. No matter what happened to him, no matter how the game's going, he's just a dog. And he just lived by that. So that meant a lot to me, him doing that."

Horn did get over it and then over the next thing. And last season was different. Horn walked in, determined to first be available. And he attacked that process in the way he had been taught.

So it's no surprise that he was recognized with his first Pro Bowl berth, one that (in true Horn fashion) didn't come easily. He was never among the top 10 in fan voting and played for a team that didn't get a lot of national recognition and had no prime-time television appearances. It was not convenient for Horn to get noticed. He had to earn it.

But his peers did notice — the players and coaches of the league, who recognized the difference in his game and the difference he could make on a game.

That's why head coach Dave Canales was so grateful that Horn got that Pro Bowl nod because he saw the work Horn put in to achieve it.

"I saw a guy that was just so focused on helping the team, on being out there, on making sure that his body was right," Canales said. "I wasn't around Jaycee before, but what I saw was just this professionalism, this way that he went about his week, his body readiness, his mental preparation, his film study, and all those habits.

"I just saw him give us something so solid and stable for other guys to see. This is how you achieve excellence, and I love the fact that he was recognized for it with the Pro Bowl and all that. But I thought that was inevitable if he could just be out there. But he brought that to us, so I thought that was really important for Jaycee to be somebody that people could look at."

And they are looking.

This defense is changing, in case you didn't notice the news of the week. Free agency opened with a flurry, with Horn's four-year, $100 million extension, which keeps him here through 2029, the first deal of many.

Then came a new starting safety. Then a pass-rusher. Then a defensive lineman. Then another defensive lineman. And then a new deal for his latest partner, cornerback Mike Jackson. In one day, they took some big steps toward stabilizing things on defense, as general manager Dan Morgan promised they were going to.

The new guys are trickling in to sign their contracts and see the place for the first time. When they come back in April for the start of the offseason program, that's when the real work will begin.

When it begins, Horn will definitely have something to say because he understands it's his place now to do the saying.

They made all those additions for a reason, and the reason was because they were last in the league in defense and allowed more points than any team in league history. You can't mope about it. You have to actively push through it. It's about what comes next.

"My main thing, just talking with some of the defensive coaches and even coach Canales, is that last year we kind of saw that when we're playing our good football, we could play with anybody in the NFL," Horn began. "The games just come down to details, like two or three plays. So I feel like it's just building that competitive stamina for winning. And I feel like we did that a lot last year.

"Now I feel like it's a year we have to make a change, it's time to go, it's attitude. We should be pissed off when we get to Week 1, especially about the performance we had as a defense. We were on the wrong side of history in some categories and how much we gave up. To me, and I feel like to anybody on that defense, if you're a part of it, that should piss you off. So I feel like, just going to OTAs, we've got to tighten up on a lot of the details and just have a different attitude when it comes to approaching this next season and realizing that it starts right now."

And he knows his part in that, too. He's still getting to know his new teammates. Safety Tre'von Moehrig was in his draft class in 2021, and he knows him in passing from that context, knows he's a hitter who "attacks the football." And he knows that adding depth up front can only help Brown and the rest of the line because he saw the results of a group that was thin to begin with and threadbare by the end of the year.

And until the time comes when he can begin in person, he's continuing his own work, making sure he's holding up his end of the bargain.

He's been in Southern California for the last week, training there while he waited — well, sort of waited — for word on his contract. He was there working out as usual when he started getting hints from his agents that things were getting close. Sunday night, there was a sense he was close to the kind of deal that could change generations of his family's history.

But the people around him, some of his closest friends and workout partners, couldn't really tell anything was different.

"So Sunday night, I knew," he began. "I didn't know it was getting done, but I knew it was super-close to being done. To be honest, it really felt weird. It felt weird seeing things like 'highest-paid this or that in the NFL.' I ain't gonna lie, it really hasn't hit me yet, bro. I just still feel, you know, regular and just ready to get back to work and now I just feel like I've got a lot more to prove."

"We were all excited that day, but everything calmed down later on, and it was a normal night."

So he went to sleep Sunday night, normally. Not restless or anxious, because either way, he knew he had an early wakeup call Monday to get ready for a workout. Well, maybe not as early as others. Since he was on Pacific time, he woke up to see a missed call from his agent, time-stamped 6 a.m. his time.

"When I called him back, he gave me the news, and then we just, you know, we went to work out, and it was really a normal day," Horn said.

And normal was what it needed to be. He still had work to do.

"We went straight to work out that morning," he said. "And then I think we came back home, and we went to a lunch spot, I can't remember the name of it. Nothing too crazy.

"That's what my, my homeboys kept saying, 'Man, you're so chill about it, like Jaycee you're not showing no excitement.' And I'm like, bro, it just don't feel real yet."

Horn grew up in a football family, the son of former wide receiver Joe Horn. So, while the numbers are bigger now than when his dad played, he's grown up in a context of big numbers, so that part doesn't seem that unusual.

The recognition somehow does.

"It's crazy because you dream about it as a kid, but when it actually happens, I don't know. It felt a little weird, like dang, I actually did it," he said. "But now, for me, my mindset is just focusing on being better because I feel like I ain't really even half as good as I can be. So just focusing on the little things and, you know, trying to perfect my game."

It's very matter-of-fact. It's very direct. And if you've been paying attention to Horn at all, it's familiar.

Despite the seat belt he'll throw on a receiver when he breaks up a play, he's not an overly demonstrative guy. He's mostly about showing his work rather than talking about work.

When asked what he'd tell the young players this spring, whether it's a Trevin Wallace, a Chau Smith-Wade, or the defensive reinforcements that are certain to arrive on draft weekend, he shrugged for a moment.

"Just bring them along," Horn said. "It's really just, mostly, I feel like it's leading by example and all the other stuff they'll pick up as they watch.

"So, just bringing them along."

That's not to say that he might not push them along the way, maybe even into the middle of a huddle of veterans. He's doing the things now he's been taught to do.

And now, with this deal, he knows it's his turn to do the teaching.