With Michigan State’s athletic department preparing for major financial losses without a fall football season, Bill Beekman would not rule out the possibility of eliminating or suspending sports this school year.

The total is staggering — potentially $85 million in revenue gone from what last year the athletic director said was around $140 million budget for Spartan sports. That means Beekman is directing his coaches and administrators to enter the upcoming school year first thinking about a bare-bones bottom line.

“I think we have to be in never-say-never mode,” Beekman said on a video conference call Thursday. “I think there’s nothing that we’re going to immediately take off the table. Everything has to be an option as we explore how to close this gap as best we possibly can.”

MSU sponsors 25 sports, 13 for men and 12 for women. Some are linked, such as the cross country and track programs and the swimming and diving teams. But Beekman pointed out all of them are funded by the two generating significant revenue — football, which the Big Ten on Tuesday announced is postponed, and men’s basketball, which had the conference and NCAA tournaments canceled in March.

Of MSU’s $140 million budget for athletics, Beekman said around $42 million is for personnel compensation — “salaries, fringe benefits, retirement, those kinds of things,” he said. Another $15 million goes to scholarships, “which are sacrosanct” to Beekman.

That means there is around $83 million in expenses — around two-thirds of the budget — which he considers to be “nonpersonnel items” that will be the first area to be cut.

[Michigan football, MSU workouts will continue with no fall season ahead ]

“Functionally stuff, whether it’s equipments or rents or travel or facilities, projects, whatever it might be,” Beekman said. “So we’re looking very hard at a starting point at our operational costs and reducing them as absolutely low as we possibly can. …

“If there’s something we can defer maintenance on for a year, we defer it. If there is a subscription we maybe don’t quite need so bad, we don’t buy it. If there’s a way to travel less expensively, we do it. So you start with zero and work up not the other way around.”

MSU already announced athletic department pay reductions in July, with Beekman set to take a 10% cut to his $772,500 salary. MSU basketball coach Tom Izzo, football coach Mel Tucker and women’s basketball coach Suzy Merchant each will have 7% reductions. Those begin Sept. 1 and run through Aug. 31, 2021, and are considered temporary reductions.

Other employees taking reductions will do so on a tiered scale: 6% for salaries between $400,000 and $499,999 in base pay; 5% between $300,000 and $399,999; 4% between $200,000 and $299,999; 2.25% between $150,000 and $199,999; and 2% etween $100,000 and $149,999.

Beekman did not rule out  additional layoffs or furloughs beyond that as MSU braces for the financial fallout of no fall football.

“As I’ve shared with our team, this isn’t a year to try and figure out how we how we shave 10% off of this or 5% off of that,” Beekman said of other cuts to come. “This is a year where we start with zero and try and spend as little as we possibly can.”

[As Big Ten cancels football this fall, the only winner is science. Everyone else loses ]

Contact Chris Solari at csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari. Read more on the Michigan State Spartans and sign up for our Spartans newsletter.