PFL Challenger Series 6 Results

The Professional Fighters League will host the penultimate Challenger Series event of the year on Friday evening when the league returns to Universal Studios in Orlando, Fla. in search of heavyweight contenders.

The show will be headlined by UFC veteran Bevon Lewis jumping up two weight classes to take on grappling specialist Marcelo Nunes. Lewis’s return to the cage comes over a year removed from a knockout loss to Trevin Giles at a Fight Night event in November 2020. The Long Beach, California native Lewis got his shot in the UFC with a first-round knockout of Alton Cunningham on Dana White’s Contender Series in 2018, using knees from the clinch to close the show.

He will likely look for a similar path to victory against countryman Nunes, another former middleweight who took four years off from MMA to focus strictly on submission grappling. He participated at WSOF Submission 1 in 2019, going 2-0-2 on a night that included a win over Gabriel Checco via Kimura and earned his two most recent MMA victories fighting in the CFFC. He will now need an emphatic win over Lewis in order to secure a spot in this year’s field of heavyweights, and his resume says it is possible as he sports a 6-1 record with five wins by way of finish. His only loss came at the hands of former Bellator middleweight champion Rafael Lovato Jr. in the main event of Legacy FC 54. Current betting odds have Nunes pegged as a slight favorite.

Lewis and Nunes will be competing with the likes of six other heavyweights for a spot in the PFL. Other fights are set to include 7-0 former UFC signee Giacomo Lemos taking on one-time Bellator veteran Billy Swanson and 4-0 Israeli Bellator vet Adam Keresh facing off with DWCS and LFA alum Chad Johnson.

The card will open with a clash of former American football players, as former Temple Owls fullback Daiqwon Buckley meets former Atlanta Falcons defensive tackle Jon Cunningham. Both fighters are 1-0 and took similar, yet inherently different paths that led to tonight’s event. While Cunningham, who trains at Jackson-Wink MMA in Albuquerque, New Mexico, balances his career with his job as a full-time teacher, while the Dunmore, Pennsylvania native Buckley worked as a police officer in his hometown before making the move down to South Florida. Buckley’s win is also notable as it came in LFA against former NBA player Royce White at LFA 120, spoiling the debut party of the 6-foot-8 former first-round pick to the NBA’s Houston Rockets.

PFL Challenger Series 6 streams live on FuboTV beginning at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT. Stay locked to MMASucka.com for up-to-the-minute live results.