1915 VFL season
The 1915 VFL season was the 19th season of the Victorian Football League (VFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Victoria. The season featured nine clubs, following the departure of after a seven year stint in the league. The season ran from 24 April until 18 September, and comprised a 16-game home-and-away season followed by a finals series featuring the top four clubs. The premiership was won by the Carlton Football Club for the fifth time and second time consecutively, after it defeated by 33 points in the 1915 VFL Grand  Final. Withdrawal of University. On 16 October 1914, three weeks after the end of the 1914 season, the University Football Club dropped out of the VFL and folded. The reasons given for this decision were: As such, both the club and the VFL had conceded it would be virtually impossible for University to become viable and/or competitive in an increasingly professional competition. Despite the outbreak of World War I eleven weeks earlier, the war was not given as a contributing factor in University's decision, especially as the conflict was not, at the time, expected to escalate to the extent  it did. Following University's dissolution, players who wished to continue playing in the VFL were all cleared to through an informal arrangement beneficial to both clubs: University wished to see its best players playing together in the same VFL club to retain the strength of its own team for intervarsity competition, and Melbourne, which had mostly struggled since its 1900 premiership due to the lack of a natural recruiting district (formal zoning was not introduced until the following year), gained exclusive access to a valuable source of recruits. Among those who transferred from University to Melbourne were Jack Brake , Claude Bryan, Jack Doubleday, Dick Gibbs, Roy Park, and Percy Rodriguez. With the VFL being reduced to nine clubs, a bye was required in the fixture for the first time in the league's history. The University club reformed in 1919, and continues to play amateur football in the Victorian Amateur Football Association to this day. Premiership season. In 1915, the VFL competition consisted of nine 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. Each team played each other twice in a home-and-away season of 18 rounds (i.e., 16 matches and 2 byes). Once the 18 round home-and-away season had finished, the 1915 VFL "Premiers" were determined by the specific format and conventions of the amended ""Argus" system". Ladder. <onlyinclude></onlyinclude> Finals. All of the 1915 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. Carlton defeated Collingwood 11.12 (78) to 6.9 (45), in front of a crowd of 39,343 people. (For an explanation of scoring see Australian rules football).