MSU’s Dantonio previews game: ‘It runs through Oregon’

EAST LANSING, Mich. From all angles, Saturday evening towers above most maybe all gatherings at 92-year-old Spartan Stadium in the past half century.

No. 7 Oregon (1-0) at No. 5 MSU (1-0) is the highest pairing of rankings, and the first top-10 meeting, since that 10-10 tie between No. 1 Notre Dame and No. 2 Michigan State in 1966. It’s likely to be the highest pairing of rankings in a cross-conference matchup this season.

It’s the winningest college football program of the 2010s (Oregon, with 60 wins this decade) against the sixth-winningest program of the 2010s (MSU, with a Big Ten-best 54).

It’s easily the biggest game of this week nationally and the Saturday home for ESPN’s “GameDay” crew. And in the second year of the College Football Playoff, it is going to elevate one of these teams and put the other in catch-up mode.

It’s what Mark Dantonio had in mind when he made “reach higher” his team’s motto this season. The Spartans have to lift themselves past the Ducks to put some force behind those words.

“We’ve lost three games out of the last 30, and we know the teams we’ve lost to,” Dantonio said, referring to national title game participants Oregon and Ohio State last year, and Notre Dame in 2013. “Our M.O. was to try to reach higher, and to do that, right now, it runs through Oregon. I also think that if you look at last year’s football team, if we win that football game (at Oregon), you’re talking beyond (previous achievements) ...

“I think we’ll be very motivated for the game, as will they, because this is a stepping-stone game. It’s not a conference game, but it’s a big, national game, and I think we all understand that. That’s why ‘GameDay’ is here. That’s why people talk about it. It’s a big game. It has ramifications that go beyond this game later on down the line.”

And, no doubt keeping in mind that MSU is holding its largest recruiting weekend in memory, Dantonio said this game is also “everything that you think about when you want to come to play at a place like this.”

The Spartans are familiar with big games, and winning big games. MSU has actually won three of its past four against top-5 teams, including last season’s Cotton Bowl over No. 5 Baylor and the previous season’s Big Ten title game against No. 2 Ohio State and Rose Bowl against No. 5 Stanford.

The only loss? A 46-27 setback against No. 3 Oregon last season at Autzen Stadium, a 27-18 third-quarter lead dissolving in defensive gaffes and a rare offensive brown-out.

Add the incentive from that loss and the fact that Oregon is the first top-10 opponent in Spartan Stadium since No. 4 Wisconsin in 2011 a thrilling prime-time win for the Spartans with “GameDay” on hand and this looks bigger.

“They were somewhere we tried to get last year,” MSU senior safety RJ Williamson said of the Ducks. “They beat us along with Ohio State, those two teams beat us and ended up playing for the national championship. If we want to get where we need to go, then we need to take this game seriously. Not that we don’t take any other game serious, but this is a big one and it’s been on my mind since camp.”

This game is “definitely up there” with any game the Spartans have played in any venue in the past few years, senior quarterback Connor Cook said. Some might also say it’s an unnecessary risk for both teams, even though the CFP committee is supposed to take schedule strength into account.

“These games are awesome,” Oregon coach Mark Helfrich said Tuesday, for fans and media, and for the long-term growth of teams that get to play them.

For playoff positioning? Maybe not so much.

“If you win every game, you have no worries,” Oregon coach Mark Helfrich said Tuesday. “As soon as you lose one game, it’s out of your control. And the good/bad thing about other people’s schedules is a lot of people set themselves up to win every one of those (nonleague) games. ...

“At some point, would it be good if a one-loss team got in over a team that played whoever in their nonconference? Maybe, but that’s never gonna happen, somebody undefeated vs. a one-loss team. But this is global stuff we can’t control. We just need to focus on Sparty.”

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