Antonio Brown is ridiculous. You already know that by now, and what he did against Washington on Monday Night Football didn't exactly change things. Brown torched the underrated-but-overmatched Bashaud Breeland for eight catches, 126 yards and two touchdowns in Week 1, while superstar corner Josh Norman just watched on in horror. Despite the absence of Martavis Bryant and Le'Veon Bell to draw attention from Brown, Pittsburgh's star receiver was a one-man wrecking crew.

It's no accident that Brown was the consensus top pick in fantasy football drafts before the 2016 season. He's a dominant wide receiver playing in an era where teams throw the ball and score more than ever before. Brown broke out as one of the league's best receivers with his 110-catch, 1,499-yard receiving season in 2013, and he's upped both his receptions and receiving yards in each of the two ensuing campaigns. It's obviously too early to say if he'll keep that trend up in 2016, but if he does improve on his 2015 performance, we could be looking at a campaign which threatens the receiving record books.

Should the record books be scared? I was wondering the same thing and came up with the idea to build a model to test Brown's chances. Brown will only have one shot to break the records, but what if we gave him 5,000 tries? Using a Monte Carlo simulator, we can estimate Brown's shot at greatness and identify what might represent the upper limits of his greatness.

We don't have enough data to really build a robust simulation, given that we only have three full seasons (plus one 2016 game and two postseason contests) of Brown performing at his current level, but that's going to be the basis of our piece. Brown has already bagged that Week 1 line, so he's already got the eight catches, 126 yards and two touchdowns to his name. For the other 15 games of 2016, we'll use a random number generator to pick one of the 47 games Brown has played with Ben Roethlisberger at quarterback since the start of the 2013 season. He'll get credit for the receptions, receiving yards and touchdowns he scored from the game in question, ranging from his 47-yard game against the Bengals last year to the 284 yards he put up against Oakland the following week.

There are two other factors which enter into the simulation. One is Brown's health. While he has played all 16 games in each of the last three years, Brown did miss time with injuries before that stretch, and he was out for Pittsburgh's playoff loss to Denver after suffering a concussion at the hands of Vontaze Burfict in the wild-card round. We can hope Brown plays all 16 games, but we can't assume it.

So, we have to estimate Brown's chances of playing a given number of games by seeing what typically healthy players did. To model that, I looked at every wide receiver since 1990 who played 16 games in his age-27 season and produced eight or more points of Approximate Value, the pro-football-reference.com statistic. Of those players, 60 percent played in all 16 games the following year, 70 percent made it to 15 games, 80 percent to 14, and onward. We already know Brown will play one game, but some of the sims suggested he could play as few as two. Another random number generator used those percentages to project the number of games Brown will play in 2016. Obviously, he'll need to stay as healthy as possible to have the best shot at accruing the massive totals needed to set receiving records.

We also must account for the likelihood of Brown getting to play with Roethlisberger for 16 games. We have a larger sample to work with for Roethlisberger's health. While he has missed plenty of games during his lengthy career, his absences include several games where he was rested during a meaningless Week 17 and the four-game suspension he incurred in 2010. Take those unlikely-to-recur events out and Roethlisberger has played in 94.5 percent of the games we would expect since taking over the starting job during the first month of his rookie campaign.

Antonio Brown's numbers seem more dependent on the health of Ben Roethlisberger than any factor outside of his own health. USA Today Sports

Brown only played four games without Roethlisberger since the beginning of that 2013 season, all of which came last year, with his numbers suffering dramatically. Brown's averaged 8.1 catches, 109.7 yards, and 0.7 touchdowns in those 47 games with Roethlisberger. Without him, Brown averaged 4.3 catches, 58.8 yards, and didn't score a receiving touchdown. That's a drop-off of 47.7 percent in receptions and 46.5 percent in yards. For each game Brown plays in our simulation, we'll also check for the 5.5 percent chance that Roethlisberger might be injured. If he is, we'll still pick one of those 47 Roethlisberger games, but we'll cut Brown's receiving totals from that game by the percentages I just mentioned. (Since it's unrealistic to say Brown will never catch a touchdown without Roethlisberger, I decided to cut his touchdowns in those games by 47.1 percent to stay in line with the other two figures.)

Of course, there are a few holes in this simulation. Roethlisberger's injuries are likely to be highly correlated as an all-or-nothing sort of thing, so it's more plausible that he misses a bunch of games or has a 16-game season than our simulation, where he's more likely to just miss a random game. Brown may be capable of performances which are better or worse than his previously established level of expectation. There's also a possibility of Brown surpassing the records while somebody else like Odell Beckham Jr. produces even greater statistics. By any stretch of the imagination, this is not a perfect examination. As a reasonable estimate, though, it will do just fine.

So, with those caveats, I ran Brown's 2016 season through the wringer 5,000 times. Let's see what came out.

To start, I can tell you that Brown has basically no chance of hitting Randy Moss' record of 23 receiving touchdowns in one season given his past level of production, even after picking up two in the opener. It happened just twice across the 5,000 seasons, which leaves two other titles for the taking:

Receptions, Current Record: Marvin Harrison (143 receptions, 2002)

This model actually projects Brown's receptions total to drop based on the gaudy expectations of the last few years, if only because he misses at least one game about 40 percent of the time. The average receptions total for Brown across the 5,000 simulations is 116 catches, with the median figure at 121 receptions. If we were to solely look at the seasons where he plays all 16 games, Brown's average campaign produces just under 128 catches, which is right in line with the 129 receptions he pulled in 2014.

In terms of getting to the mark Marvin Harrison hit with the Colts in 2002, Brown's chances aren't great, but they're better than they would be for just about any other player in the first month of a typical season. The simulation found that Brown finished with 144 catches or more 4.7 percent of the time, or just over one in every 21 tries. It doesn't help that he's already behind the pace on receptions; after accruing eight in the opener, Brown would need to average better than nine per game over the next 15 weeks to make it to 144.

Peyton Manning helped Marvin Harrison shatter records of pass-catching frequency. AP Photo/Michael Conroy

We might be underestimating Brown's chances there, though, if only because the likelihood that he'll fall just short is slim. We know from Brown's five-catch, 50-yard streak that Mike Tomlin and the Steelers are sensitive to records; in 2014, they forced a late throw to Brown to extend the streak. If Brown gets close to the record, it's fair to expect the Steelers to force him the ball and break it.

If you assume that Brown is going to surpass the record if he even gets close, his chances rise. For example, Brown finished with 140 catches in our simulation 8.9 percent of the time. He topped 135 catches in 16.6 percent of the seasons. I'm not sure which number you should use, but I suspect the true likelihood of Brown setting the record is probably closer to the 8.9 percent mark than it is to the 4.7 percent figure.

The best-case scenario, the one where Brown blows away the record books? That came in season 3,840, which picked Brown's 17-catch game against the Raiders from last year three times. Brown had just two games all season with fewer than eight catches and set the record in Week 15 before putting some distance underneath his totals. He finished the year with 174 catches.

The most impressive year, though, might have been season 1,211. Brown missed two games with an injury, leaving him with a mere 14 games to set the record. He also was without Roethlisberger's services for one of those games. (The simulator chose the Raiders game, which meant that Brown still finished his start with nine catches.) Brown still managed to pull off his miraculous feat, though, by averaging better than 10 catches per game and finishing the year with 145 receptions to set the new receptions record.

Receiving Yards, Current Record: Calvin Johnson (1,964 yards, 2012)

Brown has a better shot at the receiving yardage record, given that he manages to combine his obscene receiving volume with incredible work after the catch and a fair number of big plays downfield. When Harrison had his 143-catch season in 2002, he averaged 12 yards per catch. Since 2013, Brown's averaged 13.5 yards per reception. When we're talking about hundreds of catches, that difference adds up.

Calvin Johnson holds the single-season receiving yardage record, but it's one Brown could go after. AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh

Again, because of the likelihood of injury, the average Brown season fails to live up to what he did in 2015, when he accrued 1,834 receiving yards. Our simulation's average Brown season had him pick up 1,583 receiving yards, with the median at 1,641 yards. The average total in 16-game seasons was 1,745 receiving yards, which would be better than his 2014 total (1,698 yards).

Brown did top Megatron, though, by gaining 1,965 receiving yards or more in 7.9 percent of the simulated seasons. You would figure that Brown would try and make a run for 2,000 yards, but he only made it that far in 5.8 percent of the campaigns. In reality, I would again expect that Brown would be less likely to settle in the range between those two figures than our simulation realizes, even if Johnson ended up 35 yards short. And if you believe that Tomlin would push Brown over the top if he was even close to Johnson's figures, you might want to know that Brown hit 1,900 yards in our simulations 12.4 percent of the time.

I was hoping Brown would have one 2,500-yard season to totally blow the league away, but he came up narrowly short. In season 4,773, Brown caught 171 passes (with Roethlisberger missing one game!) and turned them into 2,490 receiving yards. In this universe, Brown hit 2,000 yards in Week 13, which is downright nuts. He actually slowed down over the final month, given that he started the year with 10 100-yard games in 11 weeks before finishing with just two in his final five contests.

In these 5,000 universes [universii?], Brown also produced two 2,000-yard seasons during 14-game campaigns, which is another level of insanity. The most fascinating season might actually be his 16-game floor, which was season 367. Roethlisberger missed three games due to injury and Brown produced just two more 100-yard games after the opener, and it just didn't matter. He still finished the year with 1,246 receiving yards, which would have been good for ninth in the league last season. When your worst-case scenario as a healthy player is basically halfway between A.J. Green and Larry Fitzgerald, you're really good.

If these expectations seem low, remember that just about everything needs to go right for a player to break a single-season record. Keep in mind how many truly great players never even sniffed setting one of this type of record. Brown had to be in the right era with the right offensive coordinator and the right quarterback to have a hope of reaching these lofty heights. He has to stay healthy and continue to play at an incredibly high level. If everything breaks right, though, Antonio Brown is so talented and has been sufficiently productive to put immortality within his grasp. Just ask Bashaud Breeland.