Bo Nickal vs. Yoel Romero is back on. RAF announced Tuesday that the two will wrestle at RAF 16 on Dec. 19 in Long Island, N.Y., MMA Fighting reported, with Championship Rounds and Bloody Elbow both passing the news along on X. This is the third time RAF matchmakers have put the pairing together, and this time it’s a catchweight crossover bout.
The first two attempts fell apart for different reasons. The original booking was for RAF 4 last December, and Nickal pulled out for reasons that were never disclosed. RAF moved it to RAF 5 in January as the co-main event, and that one died when Romero missed weight. So the catchweight label on the new booking makes plenty of sense.
Where Nickal stands
Nickal is 30 and currently sits at No. 13 at middleweight in the UFC Meta Rankings, so he’s a legitimate top-15 name in the division. He came to MMA in 2021 after a Penn State career that produced three NCAA Division I national titles, which is about as loud a wrestling résumé as anyone has brought into the sport.
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His last RAF appearance went his way. In September he took a decision over Shirvani Gadzhikurbanovich Muradov, the 2008 Olympic gold medalist. Beating a man with that medal under wrestling rules is a real result, and it’s the best piece of recent evidence either guy brings into Dec. 19.
Where Romero stands
Romero is 49, and his last couple of years have been scattered across rule sets. His last MMA fight came in 2024, a win over fellow UFC veteran Thiago Santos at a PFL vs. Bellator event. Since then “Soldier of God” has done bare-knuckle boxing and freestyle wrestling, with mixed returns. In September he lost a bare-knuckle bout to Darren Till, and his most recent RAF outing ended in a tech fall loss to Stephen Buchanan.
A tech fall means the other guy built a big enough points lead that the referee stopped it early. For a man whose wrestling was once the scariest thing about him, that result stands out.
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Older fans will remember the UFC version of Romero as a perennial middleweight title contender. He went the full distance in losses to champions Israel Adesanya and Robert Whittaker, and both of those men were ranked in the same weight class Nickal now occupies.
My take
I’ll believe it when they’re both standing on the mat in Long Island, because this matchup has a habit of dying in the final week. If it happens, I’m taking Nickal and it isn’t especially close. He’s 19 years younger, he just beat an Olympic champion under these rules, and Romero’s last RAF match ended early on points. The only thing I’m nervous about is the scale. A catchweight helps, but a 49-year-old who missed weight for this exact matchup in January still has to show up on weigh-in day looking like he cut sensibly, and if he doesn’t, we’re on booking number four.
