Can machine learning algorithms predict sports scores or plays?
There are a lot of good questions about Football (and sports, in general) that would be awesome to throw to an algorithm and see what comes out. The tricky part is to know what to throw to the algorithm.

A team with a good RB could just pass on 3rd-and-short just because the opponents would probably expect run, for instance. So, in order to actually produce some worthy results, I'd break the problem in smaller pieces and analyse them statistically while throwing them to the machines.

There are a few (good) websites that try to do the same, you should check'em out and use whatever they found to help you out:


Football Outsiders
Advanced Football Analytics


And if you truly want to explore Sports Data Analysis, you should definitely check the Sloan Sports Conference videos. There's a lot of them spread on Youtube.