Martin:
I agree that sports examples can be overused–indeed, I’m on record saying that teachers should use examples from a wide range of application areas. But there are good reasons to use examples from sports, as one of many domains of application.
Sports examples can be good in the same way that psychometrics examples can be good: they combine various aspects of business and human performance studies, in relatively non-technical contexts that can many students can relate to.
In general, I think education examples are better than sports examples, because not everyone is interested in sports, but just about all students are familiar with education, testing, etc.
But I think sports are a better example than, say, gambling, in that the modeling in sports can be relevant for a larger class of other problems. When I was a student, many years ago, probability textbooks were full of examples of poker hands, dice games, etc. This always seemed like a wasted opportunity to me: students end up learning irrelevant things like the rules of the game of craps . . . seems like a dead end to me. In contrast, our World Cup example demonstrates general principles of models in psychometrics, and our golf example demonstrates a very simple example of modeling using geometry.
I also like examples in particular subjects such as economics, political science, or genetics. Sometimes these examples require learning some subject-matter details (for example, rules for gene combinations), but at least then the student is learning some real science along the way.
Finally, I agree with your general point that it’s good to see a wide range of examples. I don’t think sports or political science are overused domains–of course I’d say that!–but in any case there’s room for more topics.