Bo Nickal accomplished something that most collegiate wrestlers spend their entire careers attempting and failing to do by the time he left the mat at the 2019 NCAA Championships in Pittsburgh. three titles at the national level. Four straight trips to the finals. a 120-3 career record with 23 significant decisions, 12 technical falls, and 59 pins. The numbers are spotless, almost unsettlingly so; it’s the kind of record that leaves you wondering if the competition was really that bad or if the person who put them together was really that good.
Most likely, it was the latter. In 2014, Nickal transferred to Penn State from Allen High School in Texas, where he had already amassed a prep record of 183–7 with 131 pins. That’s the type of background that attracts interest. In order to ease in without the pressure of a full season, he redshirted his first year, competing unattached and going 15–2 in open tournaments. He was ranked fourteenth in the nation at 174 pounds when his freshman year officially began in 2015, and before anyone could slow him down, he won his first eighteen matches.
In retrospect, the way his freshman season ended—a close defeat to Myles Martin in the NCAA championship finals—seems almost essential to the narrative. In what was widely regarded as an upset, Martin, an Ohio State true freshman, defeated him 11–9. The top seed was Nickal. That season, he had already defeated Martin three times. It was a truly competitive match, and the outcome is likely to stick in a wrestler’s memory for years. It appears to have done just that based on what happened, at least on the mat.
Nickal won every game in the NCAA tournament during the following three seasons. Over his career, he was 19-1 in the tournament and 61-0 in his final two years of college. He competed in two different weight classes, 184 and 197 pounds, during his undefeated junior and senior runs. He approached both with the same metronomic consistency, earning pins and bonus points at a rate that earned him two consecutive Schalles Awards as the top pinner in the country. Perhaps no contemporary collegiate wrestler has made the weight class seem as optional as Nickal did. Opponents were still having difficulty slowing him down as he advanced.
There’s more to the rivalry with Martin than just a footnote. During Nickal’s time in college, they had seven encounters. The 2016 finals was Martin’s only victory. The remainder was won by Nickal, including a pin that virtually put an end to the rivalry in the 2018 NCAA championship final at Cleveland. Over the course of four years, each performance sharpened the other’s edges, making it difficult to ignore how those two careers were partially defined by one another.
Quietly, the record also reveals that Nickal was hardly ever winning by points alone. Over the course of his career, he had a 76.77 percent bonus-point rate, which indicates that more than three out of every four victories came via pin, technical fall, or significant decision. This indicates how he approached each match. Not with caution. Not in a conservative manner. He seemed to view every fight as a chance to put an end to things quickly, which doesn’t exactly inspire opponents to take chances. At that time, the 2019 Dan Hodge Trophy, given to the best collegiate wrestler in the country, was merely a formality.
It remains to be seen if that dominance translates to the UFC. With a knockout loss to Reinier de Ridder in 2025, he now has a 9-1 record in mixed martial arts, which raises some questions and answers others. However, the college record is finalized. It belongs where it is—among the best ever assembled at Penn State, which is noteworthy for a program that has produced more national champions than any other in the nation.
