NANOOKS: Troubled times for UAlaska-Fairbanks and its basketball team.

There is no need here to recount all the Bengals’ legal problems this year (involving, among others, tackle and Taser victim Matthias Askew, rookie and accused sex-offender Frostee Rucker, and four-time arrestee wideout Chris Henry), but it should be noted that among the others in Thurman’s car Monday morning was the aforementioned Henry, who caught two TD passes in the team’s big win against Pittsburgh on Sunday. According to witnesses, Henry booted out of the car window while police were processing Thurman. The arrest video has been posted all over the Internet, much to the delight, surely, of team officials. In it, Thurman responds “I had a couple of beers” when police ask how much he’d had to drink. He then blows a .17 BAC, which, last time I checked, is a hell of a lot more than a couple of beers.

Thurman, currently serving a four-game suspension for his second substance-abuse violation, faces a one-year ban by the league. Perhaps he can spend the next year in Canada, filming Potfest with Ricky Williams and Broken Lizard. Stay tuned for next week’s Pen-gals arrest, after they finish dismembering the struggling Pats.

Nanook laptop madness!
It’s been a while since we’ve had a good college-basketball laptop-theft case. Oh, for the Marcus Williams days of yore! But alas, we finally had one last week when a pair of imported basketball players for UAlaska-Fairbanks was busted for a mildly strange larceny ring that reverberated throughout Alaska’s vibrant hoops scene.

Junior Chris Jordan, 20, and freshman Chris Adams, 23 (23?), both members of the Fairbanks Nanooks, were busted last week along with a 30-year-old female employee of the school’s financial-aid department after a series of stolen laptops were traced to the players’ dorm.

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Both players were immediately removed from the team.

You could call that threatening
Meanwhile, in yet another college-basketball arrest, the point guard for the Jackson State Tigers, Charlie White, was busted last Friday morning for firing four gunshots into the air in the middle of a campus disturbance.

White was charged with possession of a firearm on educational property and exhibiting a weapon in a threatening manner. His fate with the team will be decided in a special hearing on October 1.

White’s arrest came on the heels of the arrest of another student athlete with a history of firing guns (well, pellet guns): UConn football player Marvin Taylor, busted last week on larceny charges. Taylor was one of five UConn players who were arrested last year for firing pellet guns outside a Willimantic, Connecticut, convenience store. Police last week charged Taylor with stealing credit-card numbers and using them to make a series of purchases. That pellet-gun bust came more or less at the tail end of the great sports-pellet-gun-crime wave, which crested in 2004 with the Winston Justice and St. Anselm football-team busts.

Finally (and who the hell cares that this even happened), a pair of football players on the Virginia Tech Hokies team were busted for being fight-hungry dickheads in an incident that involved punching out a truck window. Wideout Josh Morgan and defensive end Chris Ellis were busted early Sunday morning on Draper Road in Blacksburg, the main bar/party drag for VT students. Police responded to a brawl report and showed up just in time to see Morgan run into the road and punch the glass of a passing truck. He then allegedly opened the truck door and tried to pull out the driver as police intervened. A boilerplate resisting-arrest scene followed, resulting in a refreshing blast of pepper spray to Morgan’s face. The whole thing eventually died down; when everyone sobered up, Morgan and Ellis were facing charges and VT was working out back-ups outside the numbers and along the defensive line. They face number-24 Georgia Tech next weekend.

When he’s not googling “dickheads” and “Hokies,” Matt Taibbi is writing for Rolling Stone. He can be reached at M_Taibbi@yahoo.com .