As speculated on Wednesday after their UFC.com profiles were removed, recent middleweight title challenger Thales Leites and lightweight TUF 8 castmember George Roop have both been released from their UFC contracts, according to MMA Fanhouse.
The latest cuts follow the release of welterweights Tamdan McCrory and Dan Cramer on Wednesday, all of which were in action at Satuday’s UFC 101 event.
Leites (9-1), who won five-straight UFC fights after falling to Martin Kampmann in his UFC debut, was recently dealt back-to-back decision losses to middleweight champ Anderson Silva and Alessio Sakara.
Roop (9-5), a semifinalist on The Ultimate Fighter 8, lost to Shane Nelson at The Ultimate Fighter 8 Finale before rebounding with a split decision victory over Dave Kaplan, but was cut following second-round submission defeat to George Sotiropoulos on Saturday.
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Pictured: Thales Leites
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Leites is 9-1 after losing his promotional debut and dropping 2 straight. Cool.
Man, Leites went from a title shot to the pre-lims, to getting cut. Man that sucks.
Fitch also went to a prelim fight after his loss, but I think that may have been because of that whole contract thing.
Ya was just gonna say, top challenger for Silva, to prelims to being cut, thats how quick it can happen. Thats why sometimes i understand why certain fighters don’t want to sign there names away for video games…etc. One day UFC calls you a partner, the next day your out on your a**…….
Leites was never exciting and was never a top contender. He is known for being involved in one of the most boring title fights to date, and was a feeder to begin with for the 9th straight win. I haven’t seen the fight with Sakara yet, but I can’t imagine it was too exciting.
In the post fight interview Dana was saying that he would not cut him. He stated that everyone has a bad night when he fought for the title. He thought he won the prelim fight. Now he is gone.
*yawn*
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i recommend everyone go to mma-core.com and watch the fight its a boring fight but the refferee is a great ref he stops the fight in the third round and grabs noth of there hands and says “come on now boys its a contact sport, lets actually fight” hilarious all refs should do that…….go mark goddard!
Yeah,that’s classic.Can’t really blame Leites though cause he was the aggressor the whole fight and Sakara ran more than Forrest.Another horrible example of judging,that almost makes you think the fight was fixed and Leites was only winning by stoppage.
Contact sport, hahahaha, that is a deadly ref burn.
Leites is only looking for a BJJ fight …he never connected with a punch against sakara ….and sakara did exactly what silva did when leites was on the ground…(not go play in the guard )he only had a little moment at the end of round 2,,,, and the 3 times that him down sakara was good enough to get back up …that says alot thank you