Bellator lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez has pulled out of his Bellator 120 title defense against Michael Chandler after a head injury suffered in training and Chandler will now meet Will Brooks for the interim lightweight next Saturday night. 
Bellator MMA Chairman and CEO Bjorn Rebney officially announced the change during a conference call on Saturday and the fight card will remain on pay-per-view.
Brooks was already scheduled to be on this card and face Nate Jolly. Bellator has not determined if Jolly will remain on the card, but they did announce that the heavyweight final between former champion Alexander Volkov and Blagoi Ivanov has been elevated from the televised prelims to the main card on pay-per-view.
During the conference call, Rebney said there is not a timetable for the return of Alvarez, but he hopes that the symptoms go away and they can book Alvarez into a title unification bout with the winner of Chandler and Brooks.
“The hopeful anticipation would be is that it’s a short term concussion, where the symptoms go away in short order,” Rebney said. “He can be check and everything is fine and there is no long lasting ramifications, we don’t know. We haven’t gotten all of the medical reports yet but with any kind of head injury, anything dealing with the brain like [Eduardo] Dantas, you don’t have an answer for that. We have seen them last for some fighters, eight to nine months and we have seen in other fighters, last three weeks.
“It’s very difficult to tell and the last place in the entire realm of injury were you want to do guess work is with the brain. You always want to differ to going much longer than you would other wise want to go than much shorter. Where as you can push through knees, shoulders, and other things if you have to. The brain is not one of those things so we don’t know. Hopefully it will be a short term thing but we don’t have any answers with that now.”
Bellator 120 will come from the Landers Center in Southaven, Mississippi next Saturday night and the current fight card lineup is below.
Main Card: (PPV – 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT)
Quinton Jackson (34-11) vs. Muhammed Lawal (12-3, 1NC)
Michael Chandler (12-1) vs. Will Brooks (13-1)
Alexander Shlemenko (50-7) vs. Tito Ortiz (16-11-1)
Blagoi Ivanov (11-0) vs. Alexander Volkov (20-4)
Michael Page (5-0) vs. Ricky Rainey (7-2)
Preliminary Card: (Spike TV – 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT)
Cheick Kongo (20-9) vs. Eric Smith (6-1-1)
Patricky Pitbull (13-5) vs. Marcin Held (18-3)
Goiti Yamauchi (16-2) vs. Mike Richman (16-4)
Preliminary Card: (Spike.com – 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT)
Zach Underwood (12-5) vs. Austin Lyons (10-3)
Justin Frazier (6-1) vs. Mike Wessel (13-7)
Ben Brewer (6-1) vs. Andy Uhrich (8-4)
Anthony Lemon (2-3) vs. Codie Shuffield (4-0)
Cortez Phelia (2-0) vs. Brian Hall (7-2)