Designing an adequate controller for a plant with an arbitrary relative degree is still an active area of research. In this paper, a discrete variable structure model reference adaptive control using only input-output measurements (DVS-MRAC-IO) for not strictly positive real systems with a relative degree of two is proposed. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed controller, a detailed stability analysis is studied using Lyapunov theory. Further, a straightforward generalization of DVS-MRAC-IO for systems with arbitrary relative degree is presented. Numerical results are used to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.