CSU Athletics Official, Blake Street Tavern Owner Display Madness in March

On the same day that the Colorado State University Rams men’s basketball team lost to the Michigan Wolverines by twelve points in the first round of the NCAA March Madness Tournament, Chris Fuselier, the owner of Blake Street Tavern, 2301 Blake Street, took to Twitter to talk some smack.

“Overrated. Mountain West. CSewe, Boise, SDSU lose in First round and WYO loses in First Four in,” Fuselier, a major CU Buffs homer, tweeted. “Forget the metrics. Forget net rankings. Yes, I’m a bitter Buff for not making Tourney. But, PAC 12 will flourish in Tourney. Come at me, Rammies and Cowboys!”

The four Mountain West Conference teams that had made the tournament, including CSU, had all flopped in the beginning of the tourney. But then, the University of Colorado men’s basketball team hadn’t even made the tourney, hence Fuselier’s admission to being a “bitter Buff” in his March 17 tweet.

“I was totally wearing my Buff hat when I tweeted,” Fuselier says.

But the drama had just begun. A day later, on March 18, Kyle Neaves, an associate athletic director for communications at CSU, tweeted, “Count CSU Football out for participating in the media huddle this fall if it’s at Blake Street Tavern again. What a clown.”

This past August – and in previous years – Blake Street Tavern had hosted the Pepsi Front Range Huddle, which brings together media outlets and the football coaches from five major football programs along the Front Range: CU, CSU, Air Force Academy, University of Northern Colorado and Colorado School of Mines. Fuselier says that while he doesn’t make much money off the event, it’s a fun occasion that he likes to promote.

“It was really stunning to me that he would just say to me, ‘Count on CSU boycotting the media event,'” Fuselier says of Neaves. “What you’re inferring is that Blake Street is a bad place.” Blake Street Tavern is an official CU Buffs bar, but plenty of CSU Rams fans catch games at the venue.

A few minutes after his first tweet, Neaves followed up with another tweet encouraging Air Force’s football program, also in the Mountain West Conference, to boycott the media huddle event, too. “We can find more neutral places to get together to support college football in the front range than this guy’s spot,” Neaves wrote.

While the bickering between the two spread to other CSU and CU fans on Twitter, Neaves and Fuselier began direct-messaging each other. The conversation did not go well.

“I’m coming after you like a sledgehammer,” Fuselier, who demanded a public apology, typed to Neaves, who did apologize for calling Fuselier a “clown.”

Neaves refused to back down from his overall criticism of Fuselier’s tweet, however. “All I did was point out what I saw as rude, blatant hypocrisy. Your timeline is full of bashing CSU but you’re happy to turn around and take money from Ram fans and host us in August,” Neaves replied to Fuselier.

Fuselier did pull back on some of his CSU criticism. “I came across as alienating the entire CSU fanbase and I was wrong. I have to be Switzerland and I was wearing my Buff hat rather than my sports-bar owner hat,” Fuselier says. “A CSU fan comes in and wants to turn the game on, I say it’s all green to me.” Blake Street Tavern has also employed hundreds of CSU students and alums over the years, he notes.

On March 21, Neaves responded to a tweet from a sports journalist calling Fuselier a “whiny man-baby” by writing, “Chris apologized and I’d still like to talk rationally, if given the chance. Not going to do it over Twitter though. There’s no sense in continuing this. If I mis-interpreted his Twitter banter, and I may have, then I’m sorry for that.”

But the fight isn’t over. “He’s such a smartass,” Fuselier says of Neaves. “The worst part is the boycott stuff. That’s where he put gasoline on the fire. For an official CSU athletic department to say that, that gave encouragement to all of their fans to call me names, because he called me a clown.”

Fuselier now says he plans to reach out to the CSU administration and ask the university to issue a public apology. “CSU, they’re going to have to do something to prove that Blake Street Tavern is a great place to go to,” he insists. “That’s a significant demographic that I can’t afford to lose.”

Neaves declined to speak with Westword; CSU’s athletic director, Joe Parker, has not responded to a request for comment.