During times of financial crisis, the first things that are added to the do-without list are luxury items.

In domestic life, those items include dining out, purchases of non-essentials and consumption of mass entertainment.

For a growing number of college and university athletic departments, a large portfolio of sports has become a luxury.

The dawn of the Name, Image and Likeness era has accelerated a tightening of the belt through cuts to discretionary expenditures.

When UCLA, the Rolls Royce of college athletics with 124 national championships in 20 sports, needs a loan to sustain operations, red flags are raised to full staff on campuses from coast to coast.

To help the UCLA athletic department cover a yearly budget deficit of $51.85 million, the university designated $30.06 million in support during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024.

Six consecutive years of budget shortfalls have pushed the UCLA athletic department’s total deficit over that period to $219.55 million.

UCLA sponsors 21 sports, which are fewer than Ohio State’s 38 and Penn State’s 31, but revenue sharing in the Pac-12 lagged far behind the Big Ten’s, which was certainly a primary consideration when UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington bolted from the Conference of Champions.

Even with the infusion of vast revenue from media rights, bowl payouts and conference distribution, colleges and universities face the annual conundrum of whether to cut Olympic sports, or using a less-delicate term from the past, non-revenue sports.

The NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report, updated last September, revealed that the top expenditure in Division I was compensation for coaches, which accounted for 19 percent of expenses. Facility expenses followed at 18 percent. Administrative compensation and severance represented 17 percent.

Salaries, facility maintenance and building construction costs are not going to decrease, so something has to give. Past precedent identifies Olympic sports as the low-hanging fruit.

As an example, the NCAA report reveals that, from 1981-82 to 2023-24, the number of men’s gymnastics teams decreased from 59 to 12 and the number of wrestling teams shrunk from 146 to 78.

Authors of the report stress that a variety of factors may affect sponsorship rates, including budget fluctuations, insurance costs, the popularity of a sport and gender equity concerns.

An opinion piece in USA Today suggested that undisciplined spending and an out-of-control marketplace are contributors to the financial crises raging within many athletic departments.

“Stop paying for a staff of 40, or millions upon millions in recruiting budgets,” Matt Hayes wrote. “Stop paying for coaches to take a helicopter to a high school game, so he looks different from every other coach there — to impress a 17-year-old kid.”

Hayes also pointed out that Jim Knowles, Penn State’s new defensive coordinator, was lured away from Ohio State with a $3.1 million annual salary, which tops what 74 FBS head coaches made last season.

The pie chart in the NCAA report clearly shows that coaches are feasting on a disproportionate share of the revenue.

The air isn’t going back into that balloon.

So instead of denying opportunity to college athletes whose sports end up on the chopping block, maybe a small measure of fiscal sanity should be restored by eliminating some of the costly perks that have been lavished on coaches and administrators.

Supposedly, college sports are all about the development of the athlete.

Or is that just a luxury item, too?

Jim Caltagirone writes a monthly column for the Mirror.