There have been 2,664 pitchers who have made at least 30 career starts since 1901.

Three of those pitchers — or one out of every 888 — own a career ERA below 2.00. Two of them are Hall of Fame deadball era greats: Ed Walsh (1.82) and Addie Joss (1.89). The third is Pittsburgh Pirates superstar Paul Skenes.

The chances of Skenes, who has made just 39 career starts, remaining in that class are slim. That’s nothing against him. It’s the reality of math and the era in which he plays. The careers of Joss and Walsh overlapped in the American League from 1904 to 1910, when the aggregate ERA was 2.61. The collective ERA in the majors since Skenes debuted is 4.04.

This season, Skenes’ 1.85 ERA leads the majors, and he’s first among all pitchers in bWAR (4.4). The latter figure is actually tops among all National League players, period. The current numbers generated by my AXE system and the futures at ESPN BET both mark Skenes as a solid favorite to win his first NL Cy Young Award.

Incidentally, Skenes’ won-loss record for the woeful Pirates is a meager 4-6. Should we care?

Yes, we should care about pitcher wins

Won-loss records for pitchers are no longer part of the evaluative conversation, so if your response to the previous question was “no” then congratulations for paying attention. If your response was anything else, then it’s almost certainly because you’re in a fantasy league that still uses pitcher wins, not because you think Skenes’ record actually tells us anything about his true value.

But what if I could tell you this and prove it: Skenes’ real won-loss record is 11-5, the win total tied for the third-most in the majors. I’m going to explain how I got there, but first, let me explain why I think it matters.

Just to illustrate how starting pitchers were written about for most of baseball history, I pulled up the 1980 MLB preview from the Sporting News and went to the page where the Pirates (defending champs at the time) were analyzed. Here’s a bit on their pitching:

“The Pirates last year won without a 15-game winner. The staff won in bunches. Five pitchers won 10 or more games.”

There were no other pitching statistics in the staff outlook. No ERAs, no strikeout rates, nothing about walks. This was it. This is just how pitchers were discussed back then.

It’s good that we understand how to assess pitchers now at a deeper level and, even back in 1980, people like Bill James were already doing it. But pitching wins still meant something as one of the baseball statistics James might allude to as having achieved “the power of language.”

That is: To describe a pitcher as a 20-game winner had real meaning. It was an avatar for quality, and if someone was a five-time 20-game winner, that was an avatar for greatness.

Pitcher wins have always been an imperfect measure, but its flaws have ballooned over time as the game and the responsibilities of the starting pitcher have evolved. Last season, 41.3% of decisions went to relievers. One hundred years ago, that number was 18%.

A good win statistic clears away a lot of contextual noise. In every game, you have two starting pitchers, on opposing teams, pitching on the same day, at the same ballpark and in the same weather conditions. While starters will never admit they are competing against each other (“my job is to get the opposing lineup out” is the standard refrain), they actually are. Their job is to pitch better than the other pitcher, because doing so means giving up fewer runs than him and, if you do that, you win. Well, at least before the bullpens get involved, but a good win stat would filter out that factor, too.

Take anyone who has ever pitched for the Colorado Rockies. The Rockies have been around for more than 30 years and it’s still exceedingly difficult to make heads or tails of their pitchers because so much of their data has to be greatly adjusted for ballpark context. And, while park effects are necessary and sophisticated, they are also estimates.

The Rockies have never had a 20-game winner. The closest was Ubaldo Jimenez, who won 19 in 2010, when he also became one of two Rockies starters to top 7 bWAR. (The other was Kyle Freeland in 2018.) Jimenez is Colorado’s career ERA leader as well, with a mark of 3.66. Every other qualifying Colorado starter in franchise history is at 4.05 or above.

Thus, when we talk about the best pitchers of the current era, Rockies pitchers are almost always going to be left out of the conversation. Their numbers just don’t seem telling or comparable.

This is where a better win statistic would be so useful. Because whatever the precise effects Coors Field might have on a game’s statistics on any given day, a good win stat would be comparing two starters on that field in almost exactly equal conditions. If we do it that way, maybe the Rockies do get some 20-game winners on their ledger.

Is such a win stat possible?

A better way to win

For me, the pitcher win should strictly be the domain of a starting pitcher. This dictum is clouded by the use of openers to start games and bulk pitchers who are used like starters but just not at the outset of games. For now, let’s try not to think about that.

The question about each game I want to answer is this: Which starting pitcher was better in that game? The starter who becomes the answer to that question gets the win; the other gets the loss. And that’s all. It’s as simple as that. Every starter in every game gets a win or a loss and no-decisions don’t exist.

Well, the no-decisions would still exist, because I’m not proposing that we erase traditional won-loss records from the books. There’s too much history attached. Early Winn is remembered in part for clinging to his career in pursuit of 300 wins, and he finished with that number exactly. Cy Young is remembered for his unbreakable career record of 511 wins. Likewise, Jack Chesbro’s claim to immortality is that he owns the modern single-season record of 41 wins. We don’t want to erase those things — we want to add to our understanding of starting pitchers.

Something I’ve proposed on a number of occasions is to use James’ game score method to assign wins and losses. In fact, I’ve tracked game score records for several years and for this piece, I expanded my database back to 1901 to see how the historical record might look.

There are other game score methods, but I like James’ version for its simplicity, though the modified version created by Tom Tango for MLB.com has the same virtue. With either, you can look at a pitching line and easily calculate the game score in your head, once you’ve got the formula down. (If you can’t do that calculation, study more math.)

I also would try to account for short, opener-style outings. I use James’ version but dole out a heavy penalty for going fewer than four innings. To avoid ties — when the starters end up with the same game score — you can give the W to the starter on the winning team.

Awarding pitcher wins like this isn’t perfect. The conditions for the starters aren’t truly equal because the quality of the lineups they face won’t be the same. When Skenes beat Yoshinobu Yamamoto earlier this season, for example, his task against the Los Angeles Dodgers’ lineup was a bit more difficult than Yamamoto’s figured to be against Skenes’ teammates. Likewise, the quality of the defenses behind opposing starters won’t be the same in any given contest.

Despite those disparities, the mandate for both starters is identical: Out-pitch the other guy. And you know what? The game score method of assigning wins and losses to assess the success of that assignment works pretty well.

How game score wins would change history

Let’s call a game score win a GSW and a game score loss a GSL. Do you know who owns the single-season record in GSW?

It’s Chesbro, still. In fact, his 1904 feat looks just as impressive by this method. Here are the top five seasons by GSW:

Jack Chesbro, 40-11 (1904)
Christy Mathewson, 35-9 (1908)
Iron Joe McGinnity, 34-10 (1904)
Mathewson, 34-12 (1904)
Ed Walsh, 34-15 (1908)

Still all deadball guys, sure, but that’s just the top of the leaderboard. There have been 21 30-win seasons by the traditional wins method since 1901 but only three during the last 100 years: Lefty Grove (31 in 1930), Dizzy Dean (30 in 1934) and Denny McLain (31 in 1968).

By the game score method, the list of 30-game winners grows to 36 and it’s not so dusty — 12 of them land in the expansion era (since 1960) and we even get two 30-win seasons during the wild-card era (since 1994). Here are the most recent instances:

33 GSWs: Sandy Koufax (twice, 1965 and 1966) and Mickey Lolich (1971)

32: Steve Carlton (1972, for a last-place team), Denny McLain (1968)

31: Koufax (1963)

30: Whitey Ford (1961), Juan Marichal (1968), Jim Palmer (1975), Ron Guidry (1978), Randy Johnson (twice, 2001 and 2002)

The Big Unit! Johnson won the last two of four consecutive NL Cy Young Awards in 2001 and 2002, during which his combined traditional record was 45-11. His combined game score record is 60-9.

When you go down the list to 29 wins, the roster is just as interesting — and more recent. Here are the last five instances:

• Dwight Gooden (1985)

• Mike Scott and Roger Clemens (1986)

• Curt Schilling (2001)

• Gerrit Cole (2019)

I mean, are we having fun now, or what? Imagine those seasons and the coverage that would go with their pursuit of 30 wins. Schilling would be trying to match Johnson to give the Arizona Diamondbacks a pair of 30-game winners. And Cole, only a few years ago, would have been racing for 30 wins in his last season for the powerhouse Houston Astros in advance of free agency. Wouldn’t you have liked to have had this headline at ESPN to react to that winter?

Yankees sign 29-game winner Cole to $324 million deal

None of this is a product of a fantastical what-if scenario. This is all based on what these pitchers actually did, just framed and measured a little differently. And I think it adds to their accomplishment (or lack thereof in the case of Homer Bailey’s 0-20 season in 2018) and improves the conversation about pitching, which now is too bogged down by statistical complexities that many or even most fans roll their eyes at.

Advanced measures would still matter a great deal of course, but barroom conversations about pitching would be much improved. I imagine somehow sitting down for one more baseball chat with my late grandfather, who was one of the people who taught me about the sport. If I told him something like, “Gerrit Cole had 7.8 WAR last year and a 28% strikeout rate,” it wouldn’t mean anything to him. But if I told him, “Gerrit Cole won 29 games last year,” he’d understand that and would not be misled about what it meant.

Thinking about pitcher wins in this way brings the past back into conversation with the present. For all of the differences between what was expected of Christy Matthewson in 1904 and Tarik Skubal in 2025, the core mission outlined by this framework is identical: To outpitch your opponent when you take the mound.

This becomes evident when you look at the list of those who have reached 300 career game score wins since 1901, a roster of greats that covers every period of the modern era … and is about to grow by one:

Next up, at 299: Clayton Kershaw, who will join Verlander and Scherzer as active 300-game winners, at least by this method. By the traditional method, none of them are likely to reach 300.

What about Skenes?

There’s a reason we chose Skenes as our jumping-off point. As mentioned, Skenes’ 4-6 mark over his first 16 starts tells you nothing about a pitcher with a 1.85 ERA. His game score record (11-5) is a lot more on the mark. Here’s Skenes’ game score log entering his start Wednesday against Milwaukee Brewers rookie sensation Jacob Misiorowski:

For his career, Skenes is now 30-9 by the game score method. He’s 15-9 by the traditional formulation. Same number of losses, but double the wins. Which version is more indicative of Skenes as a pitcher?

It’s cherry-picking to home in on Skenes, but his game score log translates to this: Skenes has pitched better than his starting opponent 76.9% of the time as a big leaguer, despite the treachery of the punchless offense behind him.

Now let’s do one more list. Here are the three highest game score winning percentages, minimum 30 career starts, since 1901:

1. Paul Skenes, .769 (30-9)

2. Nick Maddox, .722 (52-20)

3. Smoky Joe Wood, .722 (114-44)

Wood is historically prominent, while Maddox, who pitched for the Pirates 115 years ago, is not. Still, since Maddox popped up, I have to share this late-in-life quote from him, because it so typifies the old-timer mindset, “These guys today aren’t pitchers — they’re throwers. Why, in my day, I’d throw one so fast past that guy [Ralph] Kiner he’d get pneumonia from the wind.”

Skenes is a pitcher and a thrower, a budding all-time great who is in conversation with pitchers who retired decades before he was born. If Skenes stays healthy (knock on wood) and his career builds, we can marvel at his accolades and statistical achievements. But will we ever say, “Skenes has a chance to be a 60 WAR guy” and expect that to resonate?

Maybe someday. But wouldn’t it be more fun to track how many 20-win — or even 30-win — seasons he can rack up? Wouldn’t it be more fun to count down his progress to 300 wins, which he is never going to sniff by traditional wins, unless the game itself changes dramatically?

Wouldn’t it be more fun to align pitching’s present with pitching’s past? Wins have always been the currency of baseball in general, and of pitching in particular. It’s just that up until now, pitching wins have been an unstable currency.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

BEFORE CANCER, BRYCE Steele loved to run.

He became a prized recruit for Boston College as a linebacker, but as a kid, he played receiver, reveling in any chance to put distance between himself and a defender. He was on the high school track team, and he still follows the drills his coaches taught him. When COVID-19 scuttled his senior football season, he’d wake at sunrise most mornings, pop in his earbuds and run a few miles through a nearby park in his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, taking breaks only to dash off 100 situps or pushups.

After cancer, running was hell.

It was December 2023, just two months removed from his latest cancer surgery, and Steele was determined to rebuild his life, to return to the form that made him one of BC’s best prospects. Instead, he emerged from a hospital bed with nearly a half-dozen incisions twisting around his rib cage “like bullet hole wounds” where chest tubes had been inserted into his abdomen. They’d healed over by the time he started running again, but the scar tissue still burned as he pumped his fists in a wide ellipse with each stride, just the way his track coach had taught.

He could run in quick bursts, but afterward, he’d gasp for air.

“It felt like I was suffocating,” Steele said, “like someone had a bag over my head.”

Still, he kept running, first in short stumbles, then up and down the stairs outside his apartment in Chestnut Hill, then back at practice with the rest of his teammates at Boston College, a little farther and a little faster most days until this spring, when he’d reached something close enough to his old pace to work with the first-team defense again.

“This offseason, I hit it as hard as I possibly could, literally to the point of nearly passing out,” Steele said. “I want it that bad, and any way I can push myself to get back to what I was before, I’ll do it.”

Sometimes when Steele runs, he’s chasing a ghost. He’ll thumb through old highlight videos on his phone and catch a glimpse of the player he was, the player he thinks he should be again if he keeps working.

At times he’s chasing a dream. He has wanted to play football since he was old enough to hold a ball, and though cancer has often clouded that image, he still sees its contours, a little sharper with each stride.

Sometimes, though, it’s as if he’s running in place, caught between gratitude and regret, unsure whether to measure the miles from where he began or the steps left in front of him.

Steele wants to move forward. But cancer is like his shadow.

Still, he believes there’s a life beyond cancer, if he can just outrun it a little while longer.

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STEELE STARTED PLAYING football when he was 4 years old, and he fell in love.

“You could just tell the way he planned for his games,” his mother, Nicholle, said. “He’d lay his uniform out the night before a game. He was meticulous.”

At Episcopal High, the boarding school he attended in Virginia, he blossomed into a star. At 6-foot-1, 230 pounds with a relentless work ethic, he had nearly three dozen scholarship offers by his sophomore year, and that summer, he took a bus tour to work out at camps across the Midwest, including at his dream school, Ohio State.

It was during those camps he first sensed something was wrong. He’d deliver a hit on a ball carrier, and it would take a moment or two longer than usual to recover. And there was that cough — a dry, hacking, full-body lurch. It had been nagging him for weeks, and when he went home to Raleigh in July, his mother sent him to urgent care. He was prescribed an antibiotic. When he returned to Episcopal a few weeks later, the cough still hadn’t gone away.

Steele’s parents, Wendell Steele and Nicholle Steele, visited for Episcopal’s season opener in late August. They insisted he see the campus doctor, who sent him for X-rays and an MRI. The family was eating dinner near campus that evening when Nicholle’s phone rang.

“We’re all laughing and joking,” Bryce said, “and immediately her face fell.”

Nicholle stepped outside to talk. When she came back, Bryce said, it was obvious she’d been crying.

Bryce didn’t pry. Instead, Wendell and Nicholle dropped him off at his dorm where he played video games with his roommate, then grabbed his scooter and went for a ride around campus. When he passed by the medical center, he noticed his parents’ SUV in the lot.

Then his phone buzzed.

“We need you to come see the doctor right now,” his mother said.

When he arrived, Bryce found Nicholle doubled over and sobbing. Nicholle still feels guilty for not recognizing the severity of her son’s symptoms earlier, she said, but Bryce was young and a high-performing athlete. Who would think of cancer?

The doctor showed Bryce his chest X-ray, pointing out a dark splotch just beneath his heart. That shouldn’t be there. More tests were needed, but the splotch could be a tumor.

“Can I play tomorrow?” Bryce asked.

The answer was obvious to everyone except him, and when it finally sunk in that he’d miss the game — maybe the season — he broke down.

His parents tried to console him, wrapping their arms around him, but Bryce pushed them away.

“I was angry at the world,” Bryce said. “I heard the term ‘possible cancer,’ but I didn’t care about that. I wanted to play football.”

That night, Bryce went back to his dorm room and said a prayer.

“God,” he asked, “whatever you do, let me play football tomorrow. I don’t care what happens in the future. Just let me play in the game.”

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STEELE WAS DIAGNOSED in September 2019 with thymoma, a rare form of cancer — particularly for someone his age — that develops in the thymus gland in the upper chest. From there, things moved fast.

Steele had surgery at Duke Medical Center in North Carolina, where doctors removed a 13-centimeter tumor, then he underwent proton radiation at Georgetown Hospital in Washington, D.C., to avoid chemotherapy. Doctors expected he’d make a full recovery, but they warned that, due to the tumor’s size, there were no guarantees cancerous cells wouldn’t be left behind. He missed his entire junior season, but he kept the diagnosis private. What had been a steady stream of coaches texting and calling dried to a trickle.

Steele ended up with a half-dozen offers he seriously considered. He’d settled on South Carolina, but just weeks before he planned to enroll, head coach Will Muschamp was fired, so Steele reconsidered. That’s when he got a call from Jeff Hafley, who’d first met Steele as Ohio State’s defensive coordinator and was now the head coach at Boston College.

“We knew of his diagnosis, but he fit BC,” Hafley said. “He was made of the right stuff. Smart guy, great person. We recruited him really hard.”

Steele flashed potential as a freshman, then saw his role grow as a sophomore, racking up 51 tackles, a pair of sacks and a forced fumble. But after each season, the cancer came back.

In 2021 and again in 2022, doctors removed a small amount of cancer cells that had shown up on routine scans. The surgeries were relatively minor, and each time, Steele was back at practice within a few weeks.

By the spring of 2023, he was on the brink of a breakthrough.

“The Bryce Steele we knew was coming came that spring,” said Boston College general manager Spencer Dickow. “He’d come into his own and there was a thought for us that he’d be an All-ACC player.”

A few weeks after spring practice ended, Steele went in for a routine scan, where he always approached doctor’s visits pragmatically.

“If I go in here thinking I’m going to walk out fine, and they hit me with cancer, it’ll be that much more emotional,” he said.

So when Steele met his oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in May 2023, he expected bad news.

It was worse than he’d imagined.

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THE APPOINTMENT UNFOLDED like the three before. His doctor held out a chest X-ray, and Steele stared at it blankly. Instead of a large mass or scattered cells, however, his doctor pointed out a maze of grim markers.

“This conversation was a little different,” Steele said.

His doctor spoke, and Steele nodded, not fully understanding. Then he asked the same question he’d asked each time before: When can I play again?

“Honestly,” the doctor said, “I don’t know if you’ll ever be able to play again. Not at the capacity you want.”

Steele had two options for treatment. The first, which doctors recommended, involved splitting his sternum and removing cancer cells that had spread throughout the lining of his chest wall, a procedure invasive enough to likely end his football career. The second, riskier alternative was to try chemotherapy, hoping it would kill enough cancer cells to allow for a less invasive procedure that would give Steele a shot to pick up football where he’d left off.

The decision was simple.

Steele’s first chemo session came in July 2023. Given his age and otherwise good health, doctors had recommended a maximum dosage, and as the final drops drained out of the IV, Steele was amazed at how good he felt. As he left the hospital, he texted BC’s then-head strength coach Phil Matusz that he planned to lift with the team the next morning.

“Let’s see how you do overnight,” Matusz replied.

Steele awoke around 1:30 a.m., dizzy and nauseous. He ran to the bathroom vomiting and wrapped himself around his toilet. He spent the next few hours sprawled on the cold bathroom floor with his rottweiler, Remi, curled next to him.

Three days later, Steele was back working out.

“We’d say, ‘Hey Bryce, you don’t have to do this, man,'” Hafley said. “But there’s no stopping him. He’s driven to have no regrets.”

Steele had one more round of chemo in August, and near the end of summer, he returned to Dana Farber for new scans. The news wasn’t encouraging. They showed no significant improvement, his oncologist said. The surgery would be invasive, debilitating and, quite possibly, career-ending.

“I’d have to relearn how to breathe,” he said.

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IN THE WAITING room at Dana Farber, just before doctors delivered the grim news of his latest diagnosis, Steele sat alone working on homework, wearing a gray BC T-shirt with his Eagles backpack slung alongside his chair.

It was the backpack that Matt Moran first noticed, pegging Steele as a football player. He was struck by the image of the muscular athlete with Steele’s relaxed demeanor in a place filled with anxiety and fear.

Moran was 54, from Orchard Park, New York, and he was in the late stages of a nearly 10-year battle with renal cell carcinoma. Doctors had just given Matt and his brother, Bill, news that the latest treatment hadn’t worked.

Bill excused himself to collect his emotions, leaving Matt alone in the lobby. When Bill returned, he found Matt chatting with the football player like old friends.

“They’re talking like they’d known each other for 10 years,” Bill said.

They had a lot in common. Matt was a football fan, and one of his good friends had a son on BC’s team. They were both outgoing, making easy conversation. And they both had stared into the abyss of cancer.

Matt left Dana Farber that day knowing his odds of survival were dwindling, but in Steele, he saw hope. He texted Steele that evening, a simple “Nice to meet you, hope the scans went well.” A little while later, he got a reply.

“It was just something polite,” Bill said, “and no mention of his scans. You can kind of guess what that could mean.”

The brothers didn’t want to pry, but their brief encounter had cemented something for Matt. He had always focused on small moments of gratitude and encouraged his brother to do the same.

“I was just so taken by Bryce,” Bill Moran said. “And Matt always said, if you have a chance to send a note to say thank you to someone, you should do it.”

So Bill scrawled out a few pages of appreciation and an offer to be a sounding board if needed, then dropped the letter in the mail. It took weeks to reach Steele, however, and by the time he read it, Matt had died. He was 54.

During the eulogy, Bill talked about Matt’s chance encounter with Steele. It had been a perfect reminder, he said, of Matt’s knack for finding blessings even in the worst of times.

That’s the message Steele found in Bill’s letter, too. As he considered the dark and winding path ahead, he was looking for some inspiration. Bill’s note offered optimism from a stranger he’d met in a hospital waiting room just moments before hearing the worst news of his life.

The letter is now framed, sitting on a mantel inside his front door.

“Any time I’m feeling down,” Steele said, “I look at it, and I’m immediately reminded of who he was.”

Last Christmas, Steele’s girlfriend, Madi Balvin, gifted him a pair of cleats with a phrase from Bill’s letter inscribed on the side, a phrase that has come to define Steele’s journey: “You never used your situation as an excuse, but used it as motivation.”

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STEELE’S SURGERY WAS performed on Oct. 3, 2023. It lasted 15½ hours. Afterward, he was unrecognizable.

“He was so pumped full of fluids,” Nicholle said. “He looked like the Michelin Man.”

Steele had been tireless in his workouts leading up to the surgery, theorizing the better he felt going in, the less work he’d have to do afterward, but when Hafley and Dickow saw him just a few days later, they were stunned.

“The Bryce Steele I knew was this 235-pound, rocked-up, whale of a man,” Dickow said. “And I walked in and saw this kid, and I couldn’t believe it.”

During surgery, doctors found the chemotherapy was more successful than initially thought, reducing the scope of the procedure a bit. Still, Steele’s body was ravaged. He’d lost the use of a sizable portion of his diaphragm, making breathing difficult. He spent a week in the ICU, sleeping more than he was awake.

Steele took his first steps just a day or two after surgery. He couldn’t shuffle more than a few feet without losing his breath — “like teaching a baby how to walk,” he said — but nurses encouraged him to keep moving.

He did laps, with chest tubes, a chemo port and IV lines tethered to his wrist, hand and neck, inching his way down the hallway, dragging a caravan of medical tubes and bags in his wake. But he kept going.

“There would be times I’d come into the hospital,” Balvin said, “and he’d be doing laps alone.”

After nearly a month in the hospital, he was allowed to go home. A month later, he was cleared to resume noncontact training at Boston College, to attempt to run again.

Matusz had developed a plan to help Steele rebuild his strength and conditioning metrics while closely monitoring his body’s response, adjusting Steele’s effort as needed, but always looking for small victories.

“I’d tell him, ‘You’ve never done this post-chemo,'” Matusz said. “You could tell the fight never left him.”

Steele met with breathing experts and private physical therapists, nutritionists, speed and agility specialists. He cut out any foods that weren’t optimized for energy or recovery. If he felt the slightest tweak of a muscle, Balvin would book him a deep-tissue massage or time in a cryotherapy chamber. Steele estimates he has spent hundreds of dollars per week on his body since surgery, using his limited NIL income and support from his parents to make the finances work.

At the end of January 2024, Hafley abruptly resigned. Bill O’Brien took over as head coach, and his new strength staff, helmed by Craig Fitzgerald, put a significant emphasis on conditioning. Under the new regime, the Eagles would run — a lot — and Steele wanted to prove he could keep pace.

“At times, I hated it,” Steele said, “but it’s exactly what I needed to teach my body to work with what it had.”

In August, O’Brien gathered the team for an announcement: Steele had been cleared to return to full practices.

“They went nuts,” O’Brien said. “That was a cool moment.”

Steele struggled to hold back tears, but before he snapped on his helmet and jogged onto the field, he had a message for his teammates.

“If you look at me differently,” he said, “I’m going to be pissed off at you.”

What he didn’t say, however, is that he harbored his own doubts. The chemotherapy had wreaked havoc with his focus, and it would be more than a year before he felt the fog begin to lift. He’d be exhausted after chasing down a tailback. He’d deliver a hit, and for a moment, he’d be dazed.

“That was my telltale sign I should not be out there,” he said.

After a handful of snaps in BC’s first two games of 2024, Steele came to a decision: He wasn’t ready to play football yet.

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NICHOLLE HAD ALWAYS dreamed of spending Christmas in New York City, and so Boston College’s date with Nebraska in the 2024 Pinstripe Bowl was something of a celebration.

What she’d really come to see, however, was her son, back on the field.

Bryce’s redshirt status allowed him to play in two late-season games and BC’s bowl. He played sparingly against SMU and North Carolina, but the bowl game would be his most game snaps in two years.

In the stands, Nicholle whooped, hollered and cried, and when Bryce made his first tackle, she shouted, “Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.”

“I know the people around me thought I was crazy,” she said.

For Bryce, however, it wasn’t a moment of triumph.

The previous months had been an emotional slog. He’d gone to every BC practice, willed his body to heal through relentless workouts, and he’d attended each Eagles game, stalking the sideline in a jersey and sweatpants without a chance at action.

“He’d come home after games and tell us, ‘I just want to be out there so bad,'” Balvin said.

Steele built a relationship with former BC linebacker Mark Herzlich, a fellow cancer survivor who’d played seven seasons in the NFL, and he talked often with other patients such as Chuck Stravin, a 57-year-old BC alum and a friend of Matt Moran’s. They offered Steele a sounding board.

“I was always goal focused, and I think that’s the hardest thing about cancer,” Stravin said. “Guys like me and guys like Bryce, we’re used to being in control. And cancer takes that all away.”

Eventually, Steele formulated a plan. He afforded himself a few minutes every day to be angry, to let out the frustration, regret and sadness. And then he’d flip the switch.

“Those thoughts aren’t going to make you better,” he said. “Just work. Work until you can’t work anymore.”

When coaches approached him about a return to the field late in the season, he felt almost obligated. He owed it to his coaches, teammates and, most of all, his mother.

“I pushed through a lot for her,” Steele said. “She was always saying she wished she’d gotten cancer instead of me. I knew it had been tough for her, and I really wanted to see her smile.”

By the bowl game in New York, BC’s linebacker room had endured so much attrition, Steele was put into the regular rotation. He played 18 snaps and made two tackles. When he watches that film, however, he doesn’t see a player who’d overcome nearly insurmountable odds. He sees a blurred vision of the player he wants to be.

“Did I feel good enough to play? No,” Steele said. “And I feel like that wasn’t really me out there.”

Who Steele wants to be after so many years battling his way back to the field was still a question though.

When he first had cancer, Steele recovered at Duke Children’s hospital. He’d walk the hallways and peek into the rooms, finding kids no more than 4 or 5. Steele would think, “How lucky am I to have gotten 17 years?”

The last time he had cancer, Steele shared a room with men nearly three times his age, some of whom he still keeps in touch with. They talked about life, faith, hope and death. Steele walked the halls there, too, and he found enough empty beds in once occupied rooms to understand just how closely he’d flirted with the end.

“It made me appreciate being alive, regardless of the pain I was in or not being able to play football with my brothers,” Steele said. “I was grateful to be there at that moment.”

He still feels lucky. He’s still grateful.

Does that mean he must be satisfied, too?

“It’s one thing to look at small victories, but he wants more,” Dickow said. “And it’s tough to deny him, because he’s always beating the odds.”

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AFTER THE FIRST day of Boston College’s spring practice in March, Steele came home beaming. He hadn’t been perfect, but he felt reinvigorated

“You could tell he was proud of himself,” Balvin said. “He just had a giddiness about him.”

Steele built his recovery around the football maxim of getting 1% better each day — progress accumulated over time. He is still a half-step slower than he was before cancer, and he might need an extra beat to recover after a big play, but he’s smarter, more refined. He can sniff out a play before the snap, cheat two steps toward a ball carrier’s intended destination, and accomplish the job better than how his body worked previously.

O’Brien said he expected Steele to nab for a starting job in the fall, and his position coaches raved his spring performance was “like night and day” from just a few months before. This, Steele said, was the best he’d felt since the surgery.

The better he felt, however, the more he started to believe he could recapture more of what he’s lost.

On April 26, the final day of the spring transfer portal, Steele announced he was leaving Boston College. He thanked BC, his coaches and teammates for supporting him, but said he also understood how easily an opportunity can slip away. He didn’t want to miss any more.

Steele thought about life before cancer, when the biggest programs in the country wanted him. Wasn’t it only fair that, after all the pain, effort and determination, he should get the chance to script his own ending?

“My mother’s always told me, ‘It’s up to you to achieve your goals,'” Steele said. “Nobody determines your future but you.”

Within a few days, he reconsidered.

If cancer is a journey, Steele thought, the path isn’t supposed to loop back around to the beginning. Cancer took a lot from Steele, but maybe, he thinks, this is what it has given him. There is no ghost to chase. There is only some new version of himself to discover each day.

On April 30, Steele met with O’Brien for the second time in less than a week, asking to return to BC.

Whatever awaited on the other side of the portal was something the old Bryce Steele wanted, he said. He wants to be someone new now, a football player who had cancer but not one defined by it.

“I’ve changed my perspective,” Steele said. “If things don’t work out the way I think they will, I’m just grateful for the opportunity to be back on the field with my teammates. I’m more than just a football player, and it might’ve taken me a while to realize that, but now that I do, it’s made this whole journey a lot easier.”

BYU secured its highest-ranked quarterback pledge since 2002 when four-star recruit Ryder Lyons, No. 49 in the 2026 ESPN 300, announced his commitment to the Cougars over Oregon on “The Pat McAfee Show” on Tuesday.

Lyons, a 6-foot-2, 205-pound prospect from Folsom, California, is ESPN’s No. 5 pocket passer in the 2026 class and entered Tuesday as the nation’s top-ranked uncommitted quarterback. While Lyons will sign as part of BYU’s 2026 class later this year, he intends to serve a Latter-day Saints mission after graduation next year and will not formally join the Cougars until the spring of 2027.

Following a string of unofficial visits this spring that included stops at Michigan, Ohio State and Ole Miss, Lyons trimmed his finalists to BYU, Oregon and USC in May and scheduled official visits with each program for June.

Lyons later canceled his trip to USC, ultimately closing his recruitment with visits to the Ducks and Cougars on consecutive weekends from June 13-22.

With BYU, Lyons lands as a potential quarterback of the future with the program that offered him his very first scholarship offer in December 2021. He is the second-ranked of three ESPN 300 commits in coach Kalani Sitake’s 2026 class.

“They’ve poured a lot into me and made me feel very needed,” Lyons told ESPN. “The love they’ve shown — not just the coaching staff, but everyone there — they’ve shown me just how much they want me more than any other program.”

Lyons, the 2024 California Gatorade Football Player of the Year, would also arrive on campus in 2027 as BYU’s highest-rated quarterback signee since Ben Olson joined the program in the 2002 class.

A skilled improviser who can extend plays with his feet, Lyons exploded in his sophomore season at Folsom High School. He completed 67.9% of his throws for 3,578 yards with 38 passing touchdowns and eight interceptions as a first-year starter in 2023, then followed with another 3,011 yards and 46 touchdowns through the air as a junior last fall. Lyons has also proved dangerous on the ground in the high school ranks, combining for 1,514 rushing yards and 37 rushing scores across two seasons as a starter.

The Cougars have significantly stepped up their NIL efforts across the athletic department in the past year, sources told ESPN. In December, BYU’s men’s basketball program secured the addition of No. 1 overall prospect A.J. Dybantsa, a coveted 6-foot-9 wing who reportedly commanded a high seven-figure NIL deal.

The football program now has its latest cornerstone in a potentially historic 2026 class that includes in-state tight end Brock Harris (No. 32), the program’s highest-ranked pledge since at least 2006, and in-state defensive tackle pledge Bott Mulitalo (No. 105), who flipped from Oregon.

With signatures from Harris, Mulitalo and Lyons later this year, the Cougars would have their first-ever recruiting class with at least three top 300 prospects in the ESPN recruiting era (since 2006).

For coach Dan Lanning and Oregon, Lyons’ pledge to BYU marks the program’s latest high-profile miss in the 2026 cycle. The Ducks were finalists for five-star offensive tackle Jackson Cantwell (Miami) and No. 1 overall quarterback Jared Curtis (Georgia) last month. On June 19, Oregon lost out to Texas A&M in the recruitment of five-star athlete Brandon Arrington (No. 14).

The Ducks are now expected to turn their attention to three-star passer Matt Ponatoski, a two-sport star who visited the program this past weekend, sources told ESPN. Boise State decommit Bryson Beaver is another recent visitor on Oregon’s radar, with Alabama, Auburn and LSU also among those registering significant interest in the late-rising three-star quarterback from Murrieta, California.

Upon Lyons’ pledge, only two of the 18 quarterbacks within the 2026 ESPN 300 remain uncommitted. No. 1 dual-threat passer Landon Duckworth (No. 104) is expected to commit in the coming weeks following official visits to South Carolina and Auburn. Four-star quarterback Oscar Rios (No. 192) is set to choose between Arizona and UCLA on Friday.