If there is one thing that is guaranteed when I devote my column to football, it is that I will get email abuse for daring to tarnish this hallowed game with my foreign ideas. True to form, I received the short yet delightfully grammatically flawed message “You’reanidiot” in response to last week’s thoughts on my experience of Stanford at USC.

Happily, I also got a few more supportive comments, ranging from simple appreciation to convincing arguments for why Stanford will beat Oregon on Saturday, but the consistent complaints raise a question. When can I cease being an outsider and call myself a bona fide football fan?

Now before we get any further, I should stress—something which my haters don’t seem to recognize—that this is an opinion column and not a journalistically unbiased and well-researched article. That’s why I get to write about anything, and it means while you might disagree with me, that’s just your opinion. I don’t write this as a journalist; I write it as a general sports fan, and when it comes to college football, yes, as one of you.

I cannot claim that I have, or ever will have, the sort of all-encompassing football knowledge that comes from growing up living and breathing the sport. As a consequence of my nationality, it can also never take first place in my sports passions. The first entire game I ever watched was in my mid-20s, and even that was done with a healthy dose of suspicion about what seemed to me to be just rugby with pads on. But fast-forward a few years and I spent last Saturday glued to the TV first watching Stanford against Oregon State, then flipping back and forth between the top-of-the-rankings clash between LSU and Alabama and the crucial—for Stanford’s national title aspirations—Kansas State vs. Oklahoma State game.

My awareness of football history and statistics is full of gaping holes, and hardly a game goes by without confusion over at least one of the regulations—though some much more qualified individuals might deserve that same accusation—but my interest has been caught enough that I dragged myself down to LA for the USC game. The Stanford football team is no longer “it” to me; it is “we,” and I certainly feel like a fan.

I didn’t start life following domestic soccer closely, but I remember watching my local team, Reading F.C., play and lose a crucial game in 1995 that could have elevated it to the English Premier League. Somehow, that game and the ensuing slide that soon after relegated the team further down the league system were a trigger, and somewhere in the intervening years I crossed the line between interest and devotion. I now carry my Reading F.C. membership card as one of my principle forms of ID, right next to the team’s season fixture list that acts as light reading whenever I get bored.

And I’ve now found myself doing the same with Stanford; next to my university ID card sits the football game schedule.

The Cardinal is occupying both my Saturday free time and my midweek conversations. With any interest naturally comes some sort of opinion—if you like something, you’ll probably have a reason why—and if it matters to you, it’s hard to say your view doesn’t count. I’m aware of my limitations, but I like to think the best way to learn from the more qualified fans is not just to sit back and accept whatever they tell me. Instead, it is to ask questions, both incisive and basic—because if you don’t know the answer there is no such thing as a dumb question—and sometimes to challenge their point of view from an outsider’s perspective. In fact, sometimes you simply can’t see the wood through the trees; the views and thoughts of the Americans I’ve met over here have certainly had a positive impact on how I think about soccer.

When it comes to being a fan, nothing qualifies you more than the simple act of pledging allegiance to your team. Though it helps, you don’t need an all-encompassing knowledge of the sport, and you don’t even need to have attended the college in question or lived near the stadium. You just need to have found some connection that binds you to the rest of us.

This is My House now.

Tom Taylor bleeds Cardinal red, and he’ll make sure you do too if you challenge his fandom. Find out just how dedicated he is at tom.taylor “at” stanford.edu.