Moneyball, the movie, is an interesting application for baseball. Of course, in the real situation on which the movie is based, there were problems with how the folks used algorithms and with their subsequent success. Still, this is a fun movie to assign to students.

Recently, Kaggle hosted a competition on predicting results for the 2014 NCAA basketball championship. Maybe you can check some of the solutions proposed by participants.

http://www.kaggle.com/c/march-machine-learning-mania

This year a new competition is open for the 2015 tournament. You can also ask some questions there :)

http://www.kaggle.com/c/march-machine-learning-mania-2015

@ Victor,

That is very interesting. Do you have any paper or survey on this topic?

There is a big effort in the domain you are interested from by the Rajiv Maheswaran (http://www.isi.edu/~maheswar/research.html) and company Second Spectrum (http://www.secondspectrum.com/). They call it  "The Science of Moving Dots".

For the very brief introduction you can start with this podcast hosted by O’Reilly http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/11/the-science-of-moving-dots-the-oreilly-data-show-podcast.html. Then you can look for the publication done by Rajiv Maheswaran. 

Hope it helps you.