Young wrestling star Bo Nickal is set to make his MSG debut

UFC 309 marks the Madison Square Garden debut of the biggest blue chipper in the sport, Bo Nickal.

Well, such a one.

OK, not really.

The 27-year-old wrestling wunderkind from Penn State has never wrestled at the Garden. He will break the seal on that accolade on Saturday night against Scotland’s Paul Craig.

But Nickal is all too familiar with the world’s most famous arena, where plenty of tears were shed when he fell short, the only time he wasn’t the top collegiate wrestler in his weight class.

As a 19-year-old freshman in 2016, the top-ranked 174-pounder in Division I settled for second against Ohio State’s Myles Martin.

“It’s funny, I was at the Rangers game (Tuesday) night and it was like, a lot of emotions that came back because I went backstage and I saw, like, some of the places that I was like crying and stuff,” Nickal recalled with The Post during this week’s UFC 309 media day. “And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s so crazy. It was right there almost 10 years ago, and now we’re back.”

Nickal (6-0, six shutouts) generally doesn’t lose. He fell just once more as a sophomore en route to three individual NCAA titles and a 120-3 overall NCAA record.

Although his Olympic dreams fell short three years ago at the US Team Trials, he is undefeated since transitioning to MMA.

Elite wrestlers can go far in this sport, and Nickal is one of the most pedigreed to jump. It’s at the heart of why there’s so much excitement in the fighting game about how far he can go.

The UFC quickly caught wind and could have picked up Nickal right after winning his pro debut in 33 seconds in June 2022, but it chose to have him compete twice on prospect mining Dana White’s Contender Series first.

Chalk it up more to using Nickal’s already smoldering name value to attract eyeballs to the UFC’s pipeline program.

As prospects go, Nickal is a promotional unicorn.

He has competed exclusively on pay-per-view programming and debuted at UFC 285 last year on the pay-per-view portion of Jon Jones’ heavyweight debut.

(Jones finally puts the championship he won that night on the line for the first time in Saturday’s main event against Stipe Miocic.)

Although he says he would fight at the intimate UFC Apex, he is smart enough to see what is happening with the management of his budding career.

“I think it just shows the type of draw I am, how many people want to see me and the support I have from the wrestling community and the growing community of fans,” Nickal said of his marquee placement on the tentpole . events. “I don’t think they’re putting me on pay-per-view cards, UFC 300, MSG, these massive shows for no reason, right? It’s kind of to build me up, but it’s also because a lot of people want to see me .”

Most in their third year of fighting are still on the regional stage, in many cases taking five or more games a year to build experience – and make some money, which is not plentiful on the regional stage.

Nickal’s unique blend of decades of honed wrestling skills and name value has seen him make a more comfortable living than anyone with just half a dozen pro fights on his ledger, but it’s come at the expense of in-cage experience.

The UFC has kept him at a two-fight-a-year pace.

Nickal recognizes the double-edged sword he is working with.

“It hurts because I just don’t have the cage time that other people have. I’ve had less than 10 minutes in the cage total in my pro career, and most people get that in one fight,” explains Nickal. “In terms of experience, it’s negative. But you look at the positive. I’m healthy; I obviously have a 100 percent finishing percentage, and a lot of people want to see me fight. For me, the main focus again is just to develop, improve, get better. The result of the fight is kind of secondary, isn’t it?”

Craig (17-8-1, 17 shutouts) represents the next big stepping stone in a career that a project can take in stride.

A win over the submission ace, who has previously appeared on the UFC’s divisional rankings but has lost four of his last five, could set him up for a ranked opponent next year. And already some envision a not-too-distant future where he fights for the UFC middleweight championship.

But Nickal is comfortable with the cadence of his rise. He is good at the process of adding skills and improving while getting time in the cage.

UFC gold, he expects, will come, but in good time.

“I think I have a lot of work to do, in my opinion,” says Nickal. “I’ll always have a lot of work to do. Even when I’m champion, there’s still a lot of development to be done, so … there’s no limit to the timeline of the way it’s going to go, in my mind. I’m just focused on getting better. If it happens in a year, great. I just know where I’m going, and that’s it. I am concerned with.”