Fight fans are expecting UFC 300 to be one of the biggest combat sports spectacles of 2024, but Chael Sonnen has some serious concerns about the matchmaking for one of the card's recently-announced bouts.
With UFC 300 already a major talking point among fans heading into next year, UFC CEO Dana White recently revealed the first three fights that will take place on April 13. In addition to a light heavyweight matchup between Jiří Procházka and Aleksandar Rakić, as well as Aljamain Sterling’s featherweight debut against Calvin Kattar, the card will also feature unbeaten middleweight prospect Bo Nickal taking on Cody Brundage.
Nickal opened as a massive favorite to earn his third UFC victory against Brundage, and those wide odds have made Sonnen question the matchup’s place on UFC 300.
“UFC 300 is coming up, everybody’s talking about it,” Sonnen said on his YouTube channel. “You would think this must be a very big fight, Brundage vs. Nickal…I wanna just try to understand what’s going on here. Okay, in Bo’s last contest he was a 24-1 favorite. 24-1 favorite represented the biggest disparity, the biggest line in the history of the UFC…We’ve now got him in another fight on a featured card – known as 300 – he’s a 14-1 favorite."
Following a pair of first-round submissions on Dana White’s Contender Series, Nickal made his UFC debut with another submission at UFC 285 before he took just 38 seconds to stop the debuting Val Woodburn in his most recent outing at UFC 290.
While Nickal’s relative inexperience in MMA is understandably a factor in how the UFC has chosen to develop a potential star, Sonnen argues that booking him against fighters that he’s significantly favored to beat is a confusing strategy.
“14-1 favorite is the odds makers saying, ‘Why are we doing this? There is no reason to do this fight.’…Is this a numbers situation? Do we need to get Bo ‘X’ amount of fights before he goes in for a title? Do we need to get Bo ‘X’ amount of fights before he goes into a Top 5? Do we need to get him 'X’ amount of fights before he goes into a rankings match? Is that all that this is?”
Also a veteran of Dana White’s Contender Series, Brundage is riding the momentum of back-to-back victories to match his best win streak since joining the UFC. His win over Jacob Malkoun in September did unfortunately come via disqualification, and before that, the 29-year-old was on a three-fight losing skid.
Brundage will have an opportunity to derail the considerable hype around Nickal when the pair meet at UFC 300, and regardless of Sonnen’s thoughts on that particular matchup, there are presumably some big plans in store to round out the rest of the highly-anticipated event.
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