By Dan Ambrose: Former WBO light welterweight champion Mike Alvarado (34-3, 23 KOs) was changed by the Denver Police department last Monday for a weapons offense for having a firearm [handgun] in his automobile when pulled over on January 3rd. The pistol was found in the 34-year-old Alvarado’s glove department during the stop of his Hummer automobile.

The problem Alvarado had is he’s a convicted felon, and he’s not supposed to have possession of a pistol. Alvarado is saying that the pistol wasn’t his and that it belonged to a friend of his.

With the pistol being found inside Alvarado’s glove department, it’s going to make things a little dicey for Alvarado when he attends court for the charges.

At the time of the stoppage, Alvarado’s license plates were expired on his Hummer. Just why Alvarado chose to drive around with expired plates is unclear. It’s perhaps not the brightest move he could have made. The police reportedly saw Alvarado put the pistol inside his glove department after stopping him.

Alvarado’s January 24th trilogy fight against Brandon Rios will still go ahead as planned at the 1stBank Center, in Bloomfield, Colorado, USA. What happens after that fight for Alvarado is unclear. Whether him saying it was his friend’s gun will get him out of this is the big question.

“The guy I was with, he actually had it [the gun]. I didn’t know he had it,” Alvarado said about the pistol that was found inside his vehicle. “I said ‘Man, what are you doing?’ I tried to stash it away, and sure enough I caught for it. But he owned up to it, so at the end of the day he’s going to be the one who pays for it. This fight is still destined to happen regardless. Jail or not, no jail, I mean, me and Brandon Rios are destined for the trilogy,” Alvarado said.

The Alvarado-Rios fight will determine which of these two fighters move ahead for bigger fights and which of them get left behind to scrape by in fights against Top Rank’s other stable fighters.

Rios would appear to have the better marketability of the two, but he’s also someone who has arguably lost his last three fights. He was given a disqualification win over Diego Chaves in his last fight last August, but Rios would have lost that fight if referee Vic Drakulich hadn’t halted it out of the blue in the 9th and disqualified Chaves for throwing an elbow.

Chaves was actually holding Rios at the time and not throwing an elbow. Rios really lucked out with that very odd stoppage, because Chaves was dominating the fight and Rios was head-butting him all night long and getting away with it. Before that fight, Rios was beaten by Manny Pacquiao and Alvarado.

Rios has also has a recent controversial win over Richard Abril in 2012 in a fight that many boxing fans saw Rios losing badly. That’s two controversial wins that Rios have been given in the last three years. If you take away those wins, Rios has lost 4 out of his last 5 fights.

I’m not sure what Top Rank can do with a fighter who lost that many fights in a short period of time. Yeah, he’s getting controversial wins in fights he appears to be losing, but he’s not going to be able to stay afloat much longer winning like that. At some point the fans are going to expect outcomes like that in his fights and turn away.