**Editor’s Note: Each week during football season, we feature an essay from the opponent’s student newspaper on why Oregon will lose. This week’s edition is from Geoff Preston, a football reporter at the The State News.**

For Oregon fans as confident in Marcus Mariota and their Ducks as Vegas seems to be I have two words for you that might make you cringe.

Stanford Cardinal.

Remember them? The boring team south of Eugene that looks like they still play their games in black and white? A bruising, tough team that wants to keep your offense off the field and chip away at your defense until there is nothing to chip away at anymore?

Meet the Michigan State Spartans.

If you watched the Rose Bowl last season you’ll see what I mean. The game was close because Stanford is the MSU of the west. A program built on midwestern toughness on defense and timely scores on offense.

If there is a team that has loosened Oregon’s stranglehold on the Pac-12 it would be Stanford. I don’t need to tell any Oregon fans that the last time a team not named Oregon or Stanford won the conference was in 2008. The last two Pac-12 titles went to Stanford, and both times they had to beat the Oregon Ducks to do it.

The key to beating Oregon is simple, but not easy. If a team can be more physical at the line of scrimmage than the Ducks and control the time of possession battle, they have a good chance of getting the best of the Ducks.

The Cardinal had the ball for 44 minutes in last season’s 26-20 win. The season before that in Eugene, the Cardinal had the ball 37 minutes in their 17-14 win against the then-No. 2 ranked Ducks.

Last season, MSU ranked No. 8 in the nation in time of possession, behind a suffocating defense and a balanced offense that wasn’t afraid to put the ball in the hands of then-junior running back Jeremy Langford to put games like Michigan, Nebraska and the Big Ten championship away with clutch touchdown runs.

Sound familiar? Michigan State might wear a more familiar color to Duck fans and no, they aren’t the exact same team that has had Oregon’s number for the past two seasons. But they play almost an identical style, except one has a 2014 Rose Bowl ring, the other group does not.

For everything the media gets wrong sometimes we get something right. This has been billed as a war of philosophies between the new and old schools, the flashy and the tough, thunder and lightning.

Call it what you want, it’s two teams that have had success for very different reasons. Oregon has had trouble with teams with great defensive ends and a ball control offense that keeps Marcus Mariota off the field. In the same regard, it’s quarterbacks like Mariota and Ohio State’s Braxton Miller that give MSU’s defense issues at times.

Here’s the difference, and this is why Oregon will lose on Saturday. Ohio State put up 378 yards against MSU’s defense in Indianapolis. The final score was MSU 34- OSU 24. Oregon has lost the past two seasons to their philosophical enemy. In an era where airtime and column inches are how you get respect as a program, Sparty is about get some respect even Phil Knight couldn’t have bought them. The respect of a nation, when they march into the Autzen Zoo and beat the Oregon Ducks.