Bo Nickal is one of the most interesting prospects that have made their way to the UFC in recent years, and the three-time NCAA wrestling champion has some choice words for another exciting talent; Khamzat Chimaev. Nickal is only three fights into his professional MMA career but he’s been demolishing anyone that he comes up against and making it look relatively easy as well. Chimaev has had nine more fights than Nickal and has already made waves in his UFC career by being equally dominant, but against a much higher tier of opposition.
Nickal recently sat down with former UFC world champion Michael Bisping and the pair discussed Chimaev’s wrestling background and how Nickal thinks he would fare against him:
“When I watch his actual wrestling stuff, he’s basically a 25-year-old man wrestling high school kids in Sweden. There’s not really much to be said about that.”
“Let’s go. I’m Ready. I’m ready for him right now, he’s a good matchup for me. He’s not taking me down, he’s not doing nothing to me.“
Although he’s confident that he would win that potential fight, Nickal is also aware of the fact that the match is unlikely at this moment in time due to Chimaev’s high status in the UFC rankings:
“I’m 6 foot 1, 205lbs, I’m a full grown ‘85er’, and yeah, that’s a matchup I really, really want. I feel like he’s been in MMA longer than me and is a little ahead of me in terms of the organization, but I think without a doubt we have to match up at some point.“
He also went a little bit further into the reasons why he believes that he would fare well against Chimaev too, making reference to his fight with Gilbert Burns earlier this year. To date, that fight remains the only time that Chimaev has looked human in the octagon:
“He competes really hard. He goes hard from the first whistle. He seems a little emotional to me, I don’t really know that he makes the best decision. We saw that in the Gilbert Burns fight, all of a sudden he’s just slangin’ and bangin’ with this dude for real no reason.”
The interview with Michael Bisping where Bo Nickal made the above comments about Khamzat Chimaev was uploaded to Bisping’s official YouTube channel:
