Bo Nickal is still as confident as ever that he’d have success against Khamzat Chimaev in the UFC’s octagon.
On Nickal’s YouTube channel during a conversation with Chael Sonnen, the multi-time UFC title challenger expressed his interest in a matchup between the undefeated middleweights.
“That’s the fight I’ve been wanting for a long time,” Nickal said. “We’ll make it happen. I think that... that fight is massive. It’s been talked about since I [first] started MMA, and so I feel like the proper circumstance is for the belt. It has to be for the belt in my mind.
“It changes the timeline a little bit because it’s like, let’s see, if I get into the rankings and he’s number whatever, we can fight, but I feel like that it’s owed to, I think, us as fighters, to the fans, to the MMA community, for that to be a world championship fight and I can’t wait. Because at the end of the day, for me, the idea is I want to fight the best guys in the world. It’s not, ‘This guy sucks, this guy sucks, I’m so much better than everybody,’ it’s like, that guy is freaking good. He’s a savage. He’s a beast.”
Nickal is one of the most highly touted prospects to ever enter the UFC, as he’s won all four of his octagon appearances. After getting finishes in his first three promotional outings, Nickal faced veteran Paul Craig at UFC 309 in November.
Although he was quite proud of his performance, Nickal was able to win a unanimous decision, one that didn’t go over in a spectacular way with the MMA community at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Chimaev is coming off of an unbelievable first-round destruction of former champ Robert Whittaker at UFC 308, a performance that earned Chimaev the 2024 MMA Fighting Submission of the Year.
What would a fight between Nickal and Chimaev look like? Nickal isn’t 100 percent sure, but the Penn State wrestling great can take an educated guess.
“It’s hard to say exactly where he’s at,” Nickal said. “I think that he’s good, he’s got skills, but his biggest thing that’s going to crush him, especially [in] the fight against me is, dude, you’re going to get tired. You’re going to [fall down energy wise], and I’m going to go [up] as they fight goes on.
“You’re not going to take me down, which is your best attribute, so you’re going to have to strike with me. I’m probably going to take you down — maybe I don’t hold you down on the ground forever, but I can hold you down there for a little bit. And the longer the fight goes, the worse it’s going to get, so that’s kind of my view of it from 30,000 feet and trying to take all of the information that we have and look at it from a realistic perspective.”
