Bo Nickal winning every fight he’s had in the UFC (4-0) is setting himself up for failure. While it is not exactly a popular opinion, it is exactly what one peers in the promotion thinks about his future in the octagon.
The three-time NCAA Division I champion came into the UFC in 2023 after cleaning house at the Dana White Contender Series. And that is exactly the kind of expectation that proceeds every single time he fights. Even when he wins comfortably, the fact that he didn’t completely obliterate his opponent comes back to haunt him.
Take his win against Paul Craig at UFC 309 last year, for instance. He took the win via a unanimous decision but was criticized for letting the fight go the distance against a perceived mid-tier prospect. And that is what worried lightweight fighter Chase Hooper.
In a conversation with Demetrious Johnson, he explains that Nickal has become a victim of his own success.
“Coming in hot to UFC, and honestly the biggest issue for Bo Nickal is he’s winning all the fights. So he’s just getting this gradual steps up where it’s gonna get harder to get these highlight finishes”, he noted, voicing his concerns.
He also went on to talk about how losing as a new entrant in the UFC is not a bad thing. Take Charles Oliveira and Max Holloway, for example, who went 5-5 and 3-3 in their first few fights in the UFC, respectively. They flew under the radar and came into their own much later when they were better prepared.
Nickal, unfortunately, has not been and is unlikely to be afforded the same breathing room.
Even Demetrius Johnson nodded in agreement, talking about how the UFC has the best MMA athletes in the world and that expecting to finish every fight was simply not very realistic.
Unfortunately, Nickal’s ambitions far outweigh the burdens of public scrutiny.
Nickal keeps adding to the hype
The unranked prospect has been calling out title contender Khamzat Chimaev ever since he made his UFC debut—a matchup he believes would be a blockbuster.
“100 percent, that’s the most exciting fight there is in the division in my opinion,” Nickal told Home of Fight, a reiteration of something UFC veteran Chael Sonnen has been pushing for some time now.
Earlier this year, Sonnen had argued that the UFC needed to make the fight a reality before either of them got the wind knocked out of them. The former title contender had asserted that Nickal and Chimaev might have been walking on different orbits, but they are on the course of an eventual collision.
“Make the fights you can make while you can make them,” Sonnen said.
However, his Good Guy/Bad Guy co-host Cormier doesn’t believe throwing Nickal to the ‘Chechen wolf’ was a great way to test his mettle. Cormier believes Nickal has a long way to go before he can hone his skills to a point where he can challenge someone as polished as Chimaev.
Thankfully, the UFC seems to be siding with the former world champion at the moment.
For his next fight, Nicka is set to take on former ONE Championship titleholder Reiner De Ridder in a middleweight bout on May 3 at UFC on ESPN 67.
