Mandel Nallo got his first UFC win in front of a home crowd at Rogers Place on Saturday. He wore down Nate Landwehr’s lead leg with kicks and finished him by TKO at 0:47 of Round 2 to open the UFC Edmonton main card. MMA Junkie listed the finish as a leg kick followed by punches. The UFC’s official result lists it as TKO by strikes.
The first round was one-way traffic. Nallo used his length to keep Landwehr at the end of his punches, and MMA Mania’s Dan Hiergesell noted the heavy leg kicks, the jab and the counter right hooks that kept landing on the veteran. Landwehr did what Landwehr does. He walked through it and kept looking for a firefight, but he never found a way inside. By the second round the leg had nothing left. Once it buckled, Nallo jumped on him and the referee stepped in less than a minute into the frame. The UFC’s own account posted that Nallo had brought the crowd to its feet, and given the reaction in the building, that wasn’t promo-department exaggeration.
How they got here
Nallo came in at 14-4 and 0-1 in the UFC. His debut last April ended in a TKO loss to Jai Herbert, which was a sour way to follow up the contract he earned by stopping Samuel Silva on Dana White’s Contender Series last September. He leaves Edmonton at 15-4 overall and 1-1 in the Octagon.
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Landwehr’s slide keeps getting steeper. He arrived at 18-8 (5-6 UFC) on a run of three straight stoppage losses to DooHo Choi, Morgan Charriere and Cub Swanson. His last win was a first-round finish of Jamall Emmers in March 2024. He’s 38, he moved up a division for this one, and he now sits at 18-9 with four consecutive stoppage defeats.
The market saw this coming. FanDuel had Nallo at -290 and Landwehr at +225, which works out to an implied win probability of roughly 74 percent for the Canadian. MMA Junkie analyst Dan Tom called it almost to the letter in his preview. He picked the “deceptively fresher Nallo to find a finish by the end of Round 2.” A finish 47 seconds into that round sits right inside the window.
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As for what’s next, nothing has been booked. TSN’s Aaron Bronsteter summed up the mood on X right after the stoppage: “There are so many fun fights with Mandel Nallo that could be made at lightweight.”
Sal’s take
I usually go looking for the live dog, and I’ll admit I sniffed around that +225 on Landwehr this week because he’s tough and the fights are always chaotic. Then I read the résumé again. A 38-year-old who has been stopped three straight times, moving up a weight class against a longer, younger finisher, is about as far from a live dog as you can get. Paying $290 to win $100 on Nallo was a fair price, and those leg kicks showed why. As for Landwehr, a fourth straight stoppage loss is the kind of number that ought to start a frank conversation in his corner, and I’d rather see that than a fifth.
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