Killed the Pope
Facetiously claiming that a tournament "killed the Pope" or another celebrity is lingo in which a difficult tournament (often ACF Nationals) is said to have been responsible for a widely covered death that took place at the same time. The origin of the term was 2005 ACF Nationals, which was a very hard set whose date coincided with the death of Pope John Paul II.
This phrase is also commonly used as the snowclone "X killed Y" to mention the proximity of a public figure's death to a tournament that may or may not even be hard. Because of the nature of quiz bowl, almost all of the people whose death warrants mention in this format are academics and historical figures who are much, much less famous than the pope.
History
This meme may have started in 1994, when ACF Nationals was held on the day that Kurt Cobain's body was discovered.
It experienced a revival and acquired its name in 2005, when a very difficult ACF Nationals coincided with the death of Pope John Paul II. In 2009, ACF Nationals was said to have killed Bea Arthur, who was the subject of a tossup in the tournament (the last ACF Nationals to include a pop culture distribution) that was read at almost the exact moment of her death. 2025 ACF Nationals was not considered unusually difficult but was accused of killing Pope Francis, who died the day after and was mentioned several times.[1][2]
The final day of the 1986 College Bowl NCT was held on the same day as the Chernobyl disaster and thus killed somewhere between 30 and 4000 people, though this would not have been known while the tournament was taking place.