There was an article in the New York Times on Sunday about teaching statistics through sports examples.
I personally would avoid sports entirely, as I view the subject to be insufficiently serious. Maybe that’s an indication of my being a terrible instructor of introductory statistics: I don’t care that much what the students are interested in.
Certainly lots of statisticians are interested in sports. David Brillinger told me he’d learned a lot of statistics from studying sports. And I’m not completely uninterested in sports: I like to watch football, particularly Nebraska, Green Bay, and Baltimore, and to see Notre Dame or any team from Florida or Texas lose.
But statistics about sports? Yawn.