College football players opting out of bowl games was bad enough. Now there’s talk of entire teams pulling out of conference championship games.

Why would they do that?

It has to do with the just-completed 12-team College Football Playoff.

Twelve was better than four, but it’s far from perfect.

The fact that Ohio State and Notre Dame both would not have made it into a four-game CFP based on their records and end-of-season rankings is a good starting point for any analysis of the first year with 12 teams.

Ohio State, the winner of Monday’s national championship game, lost two regular-season games (to Oregon and Michigan). Notre Dame lost one, to Northern Illinois, and ND’s regular-season strength of schedule was ranked No. 57 out of 134 FBS Division I schools, by College Football Network.

I used to think eight was the perfect number for the CFP: The Power Four champions, three at-large teams and one from the Group of Five. This way there are no byes and no one plays into late January, and conference championship games would still be relevant (but not necessarily for seeding purposes).

This year, that would have meant Oregon (Big Ten), Arizona State (Big 12), Clemson (ACC) and Georgia (SEC) get in as conference champions and Boise State as best of the rest of the conferences. In hindsight, though, can we assume Ohio State, Notre Dame and Texas as the at-large teams? Without knowing what we know now it is very questionable if the two finalists would have made it into an eight-team field.

Penn State, Indiana, BYU and SMU were the other four teams that made it 12. Penn State proved it belonged with two wins to get to the semifinals.

The ACC has floated the idea of keeping its regular-season champion out of the conference championship game, because the risk-to-reward ratio is not good. For example, if Alabama had two losses instead of three, the Tide are in, right? Quite possibly this would be at the expense of SMU, which was the ACC regular-season champion, but lost to Clemson in the conference championship game, and had lost to Big 12 runner-up BYU during the regular season.

That would mean the second- and third-place regular-season teams would play in a conference championship game that isn’t really a conference championship game.

“Do you play 2 vs. 3? You go through the regular season and whoever wins the regular season, just park them to the side, and then you play the second-place team versus the third-place team in your championship game,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told reporters Sunday. “So you have a regular-season champion, and then you have a conference tournament or postseason champion.”

Phillips also spoke of a four-team conference playoff to end the regular season.

It’s been widely reported that the CFP is likely to expand to 14 teams as soon as next year. That will cause as much new angst as it will heal concerns derived from the 12-team format.

It seems sensible to just bump it up to 16 already, and either forget all about conference championship games, or start the regular season earlier. There will always be debate over seedings, but 16 eliminates byes, and maybe there will be some close first-round games between the eighth and ninth and seventh and 10th rated teams.

And one thing we learned this year is that home CFP games are very cool. This way the eight top teams get them in the first round.

Conferences used to be about geography and tradition, but much of that has continued to erode with the advent of coast-to-coast superconferences.

The CFP will likely get to 16 teams, eventually. But when that happens will be tied to adjustments to big media contracts, buy-in from the conferences and more tinkering with the old bowl structure.