The 1928 Victorian Football League season was the 32nd season of the elite Australian rules football competition.
In 1928, the VFL competition consisted of twelve teams of 18 on-the-field players each, with no "reserves", although any of the 18 players who had left the playing field for any reason could later resume their place on the field at any time during the match.
Teams played each other in a home-and-away season of 18 rounds; matches 12 to 18 were the "home-and-way reverse" of matches 1 to 7.
Once the 18 round home-and-away season had finished, the 1928 VFL Premiers were determined by the specific format and conventions of the amended "Argus system".
All of the 1928 finals were played at the MCG so the home team in the Semi Finals and Preliminary Final is purely the higher ranked team from the ladder but in the Grand Final the home team was the team that won the Preliminary Final.
Grand final
Collingwood defeated Richmond 13.18 (96) to 9.9 (63), in front of a crowd of 50,026 people. (For an explanation of scoring see Australian rules football).
The 1928 VFL Premiership team was Collingwood.
The VFL's leading goalkicker was Gordon Coventry of Collingwood with 89 goals.
The winner of the 1928 Brownlow Medal was Ivor Warne-Smith of Melbourne with 8 votes.
Hawthorn took the "wooden spoon" in 1928.
The seconds premiership was won by Carlton for the third consecutive year. Carlton 18.18 (126) defeated Geelong 14.11 (95) in the Final, played as a stand-alone game on Thursday 27 September (Show Day holiday) at the Melbourne Cricket Ground before a crowd of 8,000. Carlton received permanent possession of the seconds premiership trophy, the Rosen Cup, as the first team to win it three times.
One of the most unusual games was played at Corio Oval in round 6, between Fitzroy and Geelong. The game finished with Fitzroy scoring only 2.27 (39), hitting the goalposts 5 times, and only scoring their final goal in time on of the fourth quarter. With 25 more behinds than goals, this remains the least accurate performance from any team by this metric. Geelong, on the other hand, scored 19.8 (122). Geelong had two fewer scoring shots than the Maroons, but won by eighty-three points; this remains the record winning margin for a team with fewer scoring shots than the opponent.
In the round 7 match between Richmond and Geelong that was played under atrocious weather conditions on a slushy, wet Punt Road Oval, Richmond players wore fingerless gloves (mittens) to help them control the slippery football.
In round 13 Collingwood finished the match with only 16 players on the field.
On Saturday 16 June, three separate VFL combined teams played representative matches at three different locations, the first VFL team beat a Combined Ovens and Murray Football League side 16.15 (111) to 15.14 (104) at Wangaratta, Victoria, the second beat a Combined New South Wales Australian Football Association side 26.13 (169) to 14.11 (95) at the Sydney Cricket Ground, and the third drew with a Combined South Australian Football League team 13.10 (88) to 11.22 (88) in Adelaide, once an incorrectly attributed behind had been deducted from Victoria's scoreboard score by the goal umpires.
In Round 17, Melbourne lodged an official protest against the result of its one-point loss against St Kilda, arguing that Bert Smedley's winning goal was kicked about seven seconds after the final bell had rung. The timekeepers agreed that the goal had been scored after the bell, but the protest was dismissed when the league ruled that the bell was not considered to have been rung until it was heard by the umpire.
The Second Semi-Final match between Collingwood and Melbourne finished in a draw, the first draw in the history of VFL finals. A full replay was staged the following week, which was won by Collingwood. The draw meant that Richmond, which had won the First Semi-Final, endured a second consecutive bye week before the Final.
