Software Engineering/Internet Datamining product: Sports simulation

Title:

Online Sports Simulation Using Data Mining Techniques

Objective:

My objective is to create a database-driven "fantasy" sports league. The 
statistics required to run the league would be retrieved using data mining 
techniques. The league will a have a web (probably PHP)-based interface. 
Eventually, a artificial intelligence aspect could be added, allowing the 
computer to start the best players based on recent performance and 
upcoming matchups.

Justification:

Database management, data mining, and artificial intelligence are all complex 
and currently important fields of study. This project includes aspects of all 
of them. Also, PHP programming and web design are involved. Any and all of 
these skills would be useful to attain, and this project will help me develop 
them.

Description:

I will need to learn and/or expand my knowledge of programming in PHP 
(for the website and probably the data mining aspect), and SQL (for 
the database system). The interface wouldbe written with PHP and HTML, 
while the data mining would probably be in the form of a PHP script. The AI 
would be incorporated as part of the website, and as a result, would most 
likely be written in PHP as well. The data mining script would have to use a 
pre-existing website (ESPN.com, SchoolSports.com, etc.) to retrieve the 
statistics. The script would have to retrieve and then parse the page to 
collect the relevant statistics (probably on a daily basis)

Limitations:

The most important limitation is my own lack of knowledge (beyond basic) of 
especially mySQL databases. Also, I do not have the familliarity with PHP 
that this project would require. As a result, I would need to spend time 
before the project learing and becoming familliar with PHP and mySQL. Other 
than that, there are no other major limitations.