The first of these organizations, the Interscholastic Football League, was sponsored by the Tulane Athletic Association and began play for the city's pennant during the 1895 campaign.

In some cases a third team that felt unfairly left out of the process would then challenge the winner of that state championship contest to a game of their own shortly afterward, essentially meaning that there would be a second state championship game that very same season—effectively creating a de facto early form of playoffs, just without the sponsorship of a controlling legal authority that could award a trophy.

In 1914 and 1917, there were three or even four games that had been designated as state championships, as the annual State Fair of Louisiana in Shreveport and National Farm and Live Stock Show in New Orleans respectively had staged games for the title that had been considered too early in the season by some schools to truly settle the issue of crowning a champion.

[11]: 42  Also, the local team from Shreveport High (later called C. E. Byrd) was usually invited to play as the representative of North Louisiana in the state fair's game, which was a particular concern in 1916 when SHS had a down year.

[11]: 37  Easton had actually approached Shreveport High, the state fair's champion, about playing earlier in the season but was turned down.

[11]: 38–40  The LHSAA also faced much more serious issues in its early years, with older students enrolling in the military for the war effort and with Spanish Flu victims in general.

[44] In 2013 the association moved schools that had selective student body enrollments into separate divisions; the move was driven by the principal of Winnfield Senior High to minimize the impact of successful private schools John Curtis Christian of River Ridge and Evangel Christian of Shreveport[45] (however, despite now having a much smaller pool of teams to compete against in the playoffs, Curtis and Evangel have only won two championships combined since the split).

[51] Shortly before that event the LHSAA "was legally deemed a private organization"—which could hold future ramifications over the transparency of its inside activities, as well as its member schools' ability to internally and publicly challenge its decisions in a court of law.

In each early case, as per LHSAA rules, the runner-up was recognized as the new state champion and awarded its respective trophy,[54][55] except for Baton Rouge University Lab's 2013 team, which could only be nominally acknowledged as champion since Curtis sought to challenge its forfeiture in court—and the LHSAA physically issuing the championship trophy to University Lab cannot be "revisited" until the pending lawsuit is decided.

[52] Early indications are that Baton Rouge Catholic's recently forfeited 2017 and 2020 Select Division I titles may not necessarily be reissued to the respective runners-up.

[11]: 42 Despite the various wartime shortages and Spanish Flu-related travel restrictions and disbandments of teams, apparently enough games did manage to be held in 1918 that Easton would later be described as state champions by a national publication.

[78] Otherwise, the new LHSAA passed on designating its own champion, and a proposed, unsponsored championship game between Easton and Winnfield never got past the planning stages.

In 1922, without any official explanation, the LHSAA issued a simple statement that it would not endorse any playoff games or otherwise declare a champion for that season.

[79] Speculation was that the primary playoff contenders were just simply too far spread out from each other to make it worth the effort,[80] especially since they had fared only modestly better over the course of the season than the non-contenders had.

[11]: 62–63  As far as the Texas–Louisiana series was concerned, Shreveport High (which had at least managed to defeat all of its in-state opponents) was considered the champion of Louisiana[81] for the sake of the game.

[88] In 1939 the Capital City Free Workers attempted to host a black state championship game that included (then-independent[89]) McKinley[90] in a fundraiser for the local Lions Club that would also feature the LIALA champion, Bogalusa Central (later called Central Memorial)—with the winner to host a black national championship game on New Year's Day.

[94] Note: *—championship game not held but league also declined to declare champion Note: *—Class A championship determined by declaration because North Louisiana champion had no available opponents (no members of Class A were located in the southern part of the state)[106] In 1950, after the LIALA rechristened itself as the "Louisiana Interscholastic Athletic and Literary Organization" (LIALO), it openly worked with the LHSAA to restructure itself from a coordinating body into more of a governing body, with stronger rules and enforcement power.

[111] During the years 1965 and 1966, a tragic but also inspiring story arose out of DeQuincy as four members of their small, Class A-sized Grand Avenue team died in a car wreck just two hours after returning from winning the state championship game over Good Pine, 27–0.

[113] At the end of the 1967–68 school year, New Orleans St. Augustine left the LIALO to join the LHSAA[41] as part of the process of desegregation efforts within the New South.

Further accelerating the disbanding of the LIALO was the 1968 revelation that the association had never formally incorporated and was therefore technically not even a legally-recognized entity under Louisiana law—leading to questions over who exactly was running the organization and what they were using its membership fees for.

[116] Furthermore, what ended up being the last-ever LIALO state championship game was delayed a full month until mid-January 1970, as it "had been plagued with protests, courts suits, and counter-protests.

[120] In addition, in 2016 the LHSAA's offices in Baton Rouge received major damage from a flood,[51] which could have potentially destroyed any remaining records.

[121] Notes: *—Class AA championship game tie broken by total first downs;[127] Class B championship disputed (Winnfield Winn Training, later called Pinecrest, later claimed that it was the legitimate champion because it maintained that its scheduled championship game opponent, Lake Charles W. O. Boston, had acknowledged having too many students to participate in Class B and had not even played any conference games before being considered for South Louisiana's automatic bid to the contest—neither WOBHS nor the league is known to have been documented as having corroborated this claim, but Pinecrest is known to have refused to play the game;[110] notably, the 1951 WOBHS annual yearbook describes its school as having won the 1950 Class A state championship instead[123]) Notes: *—Class AA championship game tie broken by total penetrations;[130] **—Class AA championship game tie broken by total yardage[143] Note: *—Class AA championship game determined by forfeit, by Bogalusa Central Memorial[157] Lee L. Meade, Sr., a Minnesotan who would later become sports editor of The Denver Post and then help form the American Basketball Association, World Hockey Association, World TeamTennis, Major League Volleyball, and International Basketball Association sports leagues, briefly worked in Louisiana with the Lafayette Daily Advertiser and the Lake Charles American Press.

His mathematical system, dubbed the "Louisiana Prep Grid Standard" (LPGS), was considered quite accurate by his journalistic peers.

[180] Though the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate was normally content to just let the LHSAA teams determine the championships among themselves within the framework of the playoffs, shortly after the 1959 season they did issue a one-time postseason ranking of the top ten Class AAA teams to compare with the results of the Louisiana Prep Grid Standard mathematical system.

[223] Nineteen different schools in the parish of East Baton Rouge have won 72 total titles, including 14 different schools within the city limits of Baton Rouge that have won 63 total titles (this city total does not include, however, 4 championships forfeited by Catholic High and Southern Lab—or any won by Central High or Dunham, which used Baton Rouge postal ZIP Codes at the time but are now considered part of the newly-incorporated cities of Central and St. George respectively).

Haynesville is the public school with the most championships (17)—and most consecutive LHSAA championships (4), tied with Ferriday and Edna Karr of New Orleans (although Istrouma as a public school actually won 5 consecutive crowns when counting its 1955, 1956, 1957, and 1959 LHSAA titles along with its top-place finish in the 1958 Louisiana Prep Grid Standard final postseason rankings).

Note: *—although school is known to have participated in football as a varsity-level sport prior to years listed, records for those seasons are not fully documented