Bo Nickal and Joe Pyfer are off the UFC 335 main card in Las Vegas. Nickal announced Wednesday that the middleweight bout has been pushed back to February 2027, where it will headline a UFC return to Cleveland, Ohio.
The announcement came at a political rally
Nickal broke the news on October 15 at Vivek Ramaswamy’s “RedHawks Rally” at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He said he got a call from the UFC backstage just before going on stage. “It actually got moved to February, where I’m going to be main eventing in Cleveland,” Nickal said. The UFC had made no official announcement as of this writing, and the promotion has not said whether an existing UFC 335 bout will be elevated to replace the Nickal-Pyfer fight on December 12, or whether a new pairing will be added to the card. Nickal has never headlined a UFC event. His lone professional loss came by TKO to Reinier de Ridder, and the promotion to a Cleveland main event puts him in front of his biggest audience yet, with a fighter in Pyfer who has already beaten a former champion this year.
A three-round fight becomes a five-round main event
The bout was originally scheduled for three five-minute rounds on the UFC 335 main card at T-Mobile Arena. As a headliner in Cleveland, it moves to five five-minute rounds, stretching the maximum possible fight time from 15 minutes to 25. Nickal summed up his plan in blunt terms: “We are gonna go smash this guy and then go take the belt.” The Cleveland date would mark the UFC’s first event in the city since September 10, 2016, when Stipe Miocic knocked out Alistair Overeem in the first round. The extra two rounds also change the calculus for both men, giving either fighter more time to find a finish in a bout now built for the long haul rather than a three-round sprint.
Pyfer fires back on Instagram
Joe Pyfer responded by reposting Nickal’s video on Instagram, captioning it with a jab at Nickal’s “fake dreams” and calling the pairing a “poor kid vs. rich kid” matchup. The exchange extends a rivalry the two have carried on through interviews for months. Pyfer has previously turned “fraud check” talk, the label fighters in the sport use for someone exposed against real competition, back on Nickal following his TKO loss to Reinier de Ridder, arguing Nickal is the one who deserves the tag. Pyfer, for his part, beat Israel Adesanya at UFC Seattle earlier this year. He lost by split decision to Jack Hermansson in 2024, a fight he has said he was not at full strength for, and he was previously booked to face Kelvin Gastelum at UFC 315 in 2025. The back-and-forth over who got “fraud checked” first has become a running theme of the build-up, and the extra months before February give both camps time to keep trading jabs in public before they do it in the cage.
An unfinished UFC 335 card
The UFC has not said how it will fill the main card slot left open for December 12 in Las Vegas. There is a recent precedent for this kind of late reshuffle. In 2021, the promotion turned a three-round Sean Strickland vs. Uriah Hall bout on the UFC 265 main card into a five-round headliner without publicly explaining the move. The lead time this time, roughly two months between Nickal’s announcement and the new February date, is considerably longer than in that 2021 case, where the change came much closer to the event itself. That longer runway gives the UFC room to put together a replacement main event for Las Vegas without rushing a late addition, and it gives Nickal and Pyfer extra time to build toward a five-round fight instead of the three-round bout they had been training for.
What is still open before UFC 335
The full UFC 335 lineup for December 12 is expected to take shape over the coming weeks, as is the card for the February 2027 return to Cleveland. UFC events air in the United States on Paramount+, with select main cards also carried on CBS; fans should check listings closer to each date to confirm the broadcast. The complete lineup of upcoming UFC cards is tracked on MMA Official’s 2026 UFC schedule page.
