BC Bulletin

Boston College Football LB Nominated for 2025 Courage Award Following Cancer Battle: The Rundown

Despite the lack of success for the Eagles this year, this award nomination can serve as a reminder of the more important things in life.
Graham Dietz|
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Boston College football linebacker Bryce Steele, who returned this year after successfully battling cancer—which forced him to miss the entirety of the 2023 season and nine games of 2024—was nominated for the 2025 Capital One Orange Bowl-FWAA Courage Award.

The Courage Award was first presented by the Football Writers Association of America in 2002, and the requirements for the award include displaying courage on or off the field, including overcoming an injury or physical handicap, preventing a disaster or living through hardship.

Steele’s cancer battle in 2023 was not his only fight with the illness.

In September of 2019, when he was a junior in high school, Steele was initially diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called thymoma, which develops in the thymus gland in the upper chest. Steele had surgery at Duke Medical Center in North Carolina to remove the 13-centimeter tumor right under his heart, which forced him to miss his entire junior season.

He kept the diagnosis private as offers from Power-Four, Division-1 football programs began to trickle in, and Steele committed to South Carolina amid his absence. But when former head coach Will Muschamp was fired, Steele reconsidered his options.

Then, he got a call from former BC football head coach Jeff Hafley, who recruited Steele hard, according to ESPN, because he was a perfect fit for what the school embodies—toughness and character. By the time he got to BC, Steele had made a recovery from his first bout with thymoma.

As a sophomore for the Eagles after seeing the field occasionally as a true freshman, the linebacker collected 51 tackles, two sacks and a forced fumble, boasting serious potential.

But the cancer came back after each season, and doctors had to remove smaller chunks of cancer cells that showed up on routine scans after both his 2021 and 2022 campaign. By spring of 2023, Steele finally saw his chance to break free once and for all.

That is when the worst of it hit.

A third scan showed that cancer cells had begun spreading throughout the lining of his chest wall, and Steele was confronted with two options. The first entailed splitting open his sternum and removing the cancer cells, which was invasive enough to potentially end Steele’s football career.

So he went down the alternative route of trying chemotherapy in hopes of returning to the field after a brief hiatus. He showed up for his first chemo session in July of 2023.

Still, the chemo did not do the trick, and Steele finally faced the ultimate test—surgery.

Steele's surgery was performed on Oct. 3, 2023, and it lasted 15½ hours. Steele’s body was wrecked because of all the fluids that were pumped into his body, and he described the feeling of walking like “teaching a baby.” But he kept on moving.

Two months later, after returning home from the hospital a month prior to that, Steele was cleared to resume non-contact training at BC. He did not just need to learn how to walk again—his diaphragm lost so much girth that he needed to learn how to breathe again as well, and rebuilding his body took a monumental effort.

Finally, in August of 2024, even as a new regime in the BC football program took over under Bill O’Brien when Hafley abruptly resigned, Steele was finally able to return to full practices. The team went berserk.

Fast forward to the week before BC’s final three games of the 2025 season, as the Eagles prepare to host SMU for the 2025 Red Bandanna game, and Steele is back in form. This season, Steele has started multiple games and has also sat out of some, but his dream of fully returning to the field was completed.

Steele has manufactured 14 tackles in 2025, along with a quarterback hit and a pass break-up, but these numbers are essentially meaningless in the grand scope of his journey from 2019 until now.

It is no exaggeration to say that Steele would be a fitting honoree of the 2025 Courage Award, and the winner of the award, according to the press release from Wednesday, will be included in festivities during Capital One Orange Bowl week and receive a trophy at an on-field presentation.

Here is The Rundown, your daily stop for the latest Boston College athletics news, for Thursday, Nov. 6.

Thursday's Schedule

Women's Basketball: vs. New Hampshire, 1 p.m. ET | Live Stats

Men's Basketball: vs. The Citadel, 7 p.m. ET | Live Stats | Radio

Wednesday's Results

Men's Soccer: Stanford 4, Boston College 2

Did You Notice?

  • Bill O'Brien's post-practice press conference on Tuesday, in which he lashed out at a reporter for a question about his message to the fans after the Eagles dropped to 1-8 with a loss to No. 12 Notre Dame, continues to go viral over social media, reaching outlets such as Barstool Sports, Bleacher Report, and USA Today, among dozens of others. It all started with a simple tweet.
  • Boston College women's hockey's Ava Thomas was named the Hockey East Player of the Month after she recorded 14 points in nine games.
  • BC's Red Bandanna game is this week, which means the Eagles will be suiting up in customized red bandanna uniforms as an ode to Welles Crowther (BC '99), a former BC men's lacrosse player who was credited with saving over a dozen lives in the Sept. 11 attacks. Check out some of the new features of the uniform:

Boston College Eagles Quote of the Day:

"It was something about the sport that I just instantly fell in love with. I know I was impressive, I knew I liked to run around with the ball in my hand, I knew sports was for me but there was just something about football. I don't know what it was but I joke about it, I chose the sport my mom hated the most.”

- Donovan Ezeiruaku

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Graham Dietz
GRAHAM DIETZ

Graham Dietz is a 2025 graduate of Boston College and subsequently joined Boston College On SI. He previously served as an editor for The Heights, the independent student newspaper, from fall 2021, including as Sports Editor from 2022-23. Graham works for The Boston Globe as a sports correspondent, covering high school football, girls' basketball, and baseball. He was also a beat writer for the Chatham Anglers of the Cape Cod Baseball League in the summer of 2023.

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