Suspended players have been given letters outlining the conditions they must meet to re-enroll. These conditions may include visits with school counselors, service projects, drug testing and attending campus religious devotionals.

What the future holds for the four players most recently disciplined remains unclear.

Some may come back in a year, others may never return. As for Whalen, he hopes to play in the NFL one day. For now, he is working two jobs, one at the Provo Marriott, the other at a local bakery.

Black at BYU

Last semester, an estimated 179 black students enrolled at BYU out of a student population of 29,932. Those figures haven't changed much this semester, although hard numbers are not yet available.

One black student enrolled at BYU is Corey Riley, a freshman from Austin, Texas. Asked what it's like to be black at BYU, Riley smiles and shakes his head. "I wouldn't say there's a lot of racism, I'd call it more ignorance because people haven't talked to many black people," he says. "They just assume for you to act a certain way or to be good at sports. I'm all right at basketball, but people expect me to be amazing.

"Or they assume you're a convert to the church. People are shocked when they find out I served a mission."

Reginald Hyppolitt came to BYU from a neighborhood in Brooklyn where most of his neighbors were black. "Surprisingly I haven't come across prejudice very often, but it does happen, don't get me wrong," he says.

Both doubt the Honor Code Office would treat black students differently than whites. Because BYU is made up of students from all over the country, Riley says it is a more tolerant environment than the surrounding community.

This summer, for example, he said he was teaching swimming lessons at a Provo pool when a grandmother asked her crying grandson if he was upset because Riley's skin was brown.

"I told her, 'No, he's upset because the water is cold,' "Riley says. "I mean, comments like that you have to ignore. You just hope they are ignorant and not consciously making a decision to think that way."

This is the kind of racism many blacks in Utah commonly encounter, says Darron Smith, an adjunct sociology professor at BYU and editor of a recently released collection of essays called "Black and Mormon." He calls the daily insults blacks have to endure in predominately white areas "micro-aggressions."

"People don't think there's racism here because they think racism is burning a cross and calling people (a racial slur)," Smith says. "It's institutionalized racism. It's a subversive, normalized type of racism that we don't have to do anything about because nobody's talking about it and nobody wants to acknowledge it exists."