Bo Nickal has big aspirations for his MMA career.
The three-time NCAA Division I national champion wrestler turned heads over the weekend for his spectacular performance in his professional MMA debut. After going 2-0 as an amateur, Nickal needed just 33 seconds to score a highlight-reel knockout over John Noland on Friday night at IKON FC 3, and he didn’t even use a single takedown to do it.
At age 26, Nickal is just getting started in MMA. But he already has goals of dominating the sport in the same way he dominated wrestling in the collegiate ranks.
“I’m out to be the No. 1 pound-for-pound-fighter in the world. So that’s what I want to do, that’s what I’m here here to do, and that’s what I’m going to accomplish in the next five years,” Nickal said Monday on The MMA Hour.
“That’s where I will be, without a doubt, within half a decade. … No doubt in my mind. I think that it’s a long path. There’s a lot of things that can happen in five years. That’s a long time, especially in the MMA world. I’m not ignorant, I’m not oblivious, I’m not one of those dudes that says all this crazy stuff. I think these are realistic goals for me. I don’t ever set a goal out and just say it to say it, like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be world champion,’ or this and that. Like, that’s something that I’ve thought long and hard about — not only what I want to do, but the timeline behind it too. And I feel like that’s a feasible accomplishment for me.
