Bo Nickal has long been praised as one of the best prospects to ever sign with the UFC after he was a three-time NCAA champion wrestler at Penn State, but he faced his first real adversity this past May when he suffered a brutal body shot knockout loss to Reinier de Ridder.
The fight served as Nickal’s first defeat, but like so many highly touted athletes from the past, he immediately faced criticism that perhaps he wasn’t as good as everybody expected. The reality was Nickal probably shouldn’t have been facing a former two-division ONE champion in his eighth professional fight and only his fifth appearance in the UFC.
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His longtime head coach Mike Brown from American Top Team acknowledged the fight against de Ridder was too much, too soon but that was just the nature of beast given Nickal’s status with the UFC.
“He was moving a bit too fast,” Brown told MMA Fighting. “We all knew it. He knew it. I knew it. We all knew it. Management knew it. But he was also was getting paid very well. You’re not going to get the big bucks if you’re fighting guys on the prelims. If you’re getting bigger paychecks, then they’re going to push you and not give you layups.
“Experience is so much in this sport. Experience is everything. He went a little too quick, a little too fast but also it was a little bit of pressure off surprisingly when de Ridder after he beat Bo, he beat ‘Bobby Knuckles’ [Robert] Whittaker.”
The win over Nickal catapulted de Ridder up the middleweight ranks and his next victory over former middleweight champion Robert Whittaker put the Dutch fighter arguably one win away from a title shot. Sadly for him, de Ridder fell to Brendan Allen in his final fight in 2025, but he remains one of the top 185-pounders on the UFC roster.
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As disappointing as it was to see Nickal suffer the loss, Brown knows he learned a lot from that fight and it only made him that much better afterwards.
“It’s not a fight I necessarily wanted 100 percent,” Brown said. “There are other guys I would have rather had. [Reinier de Ridder] just showed that he’s better than a lot of people in that division. He’s capable of big things. He’s got more experience than Bo and it showed.
“That’s the fight game. In this game, everybody loses or 99.9 percent of every great UFC fighter loses.”
Following a six-month hiatus between fights, Nickal returned at UFC 322 and put on a much better performance as he dominated multi-time grappling champion Rodolfo Vieira before scoring a devastating head kick knockout in the third round.
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The win put Nickal back on track and also yielded him a $50,000 Performance of the Night bonus.
More importantly, Nickal added more cage time to his resume, and Brown believes that fight showed the constant improvements being made to eventually put him in a position to battle for a UFC title one day.
“It was a nice comeback,” Brown said. “He dominated. He looked great. He had a nice highlight reel KO, which was beautiful.”
Nickal hasn’t booked his next fight yet but he is set to face Yoel Romero at RAF 5 on Saturday in a very intriguing matchup between two very accomplished wrestlers.
Once he returns to the UFC, Nickal is obviously going to try to start building a new win streak, but his coach recognizes that he still has a long way to go until he’s a tearing through the rankings and potentially challenging for a title.
That said, Brown has no doubt Nickal is going to get there eventually.
“Agreed, 100 percent, [he’s going to become a champion],” Brown said. “He’s a special athlete.”
