According to the website TMZ welterweight fighter Thiago Alves has been forced off the UFC 111with brain irregularity. Alves was set to face Jon Fitch in a rematch on the nights main card but during a pre-fight CAT scan revealed the irregularity in an artery in the brain. The article also states there will be no replacement fighter brought in to replace Alves leaving Fitch without a fight on Saturday. The UFC is going  fly Pitbull to a specialist for further evaluation but obviously something like this is not to be taken lightly. Hopefully this is something that can be fixed, so we can see him in the ring kicking legs and busting heads again.

If not replacement is going to be found one of the undercard fights will now be moved to the main card. My guess is that it will be one of the fights scheduled to air on Spike before the PPV, Nate Diaz vs. Rory Markham or Matt Brown vs. Ricardo Almeida. If they are wanting to keep those fights in their spot on Spike then we could see the Rousimar Palhares vs. Tomasz Drwal get moved up. The fight card suffers some with the lose of the Fitch vs. Alves fight but with two title fights on the card the PPV numbers should not be affected.

[update] Both Jon Fitch and Ben Saunders are making statements via social networking about Saturday night. Fitch is claiming he’s got a fight now on Saturday and Saunders is claiming big news about Saturday coming…..Sounds as if Saunders will not be fighting Jake Ellenberger and step in for Alves to face Fitch. This is great news and a pretty nice fight that I’m interested to see. Wonder where this now leaves Ellenberger??? The word right now is that the Kurt Pellegrino vs. Fabricio Camoes has been moved to the main card.

HT: Matthew Wheeler (Staff Writer) for the heads up.

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