From the Gainesville Sun:
"I don't condone (what Spikes did)," [Urban] Meyer said at his weekly news conference. "There's no place on the field for that. We're going to suspend him for the first half of the Vanderbilt game. That's not him. But we love Brandon Spikes and the team is going to support him.
"It's hard. I just spoke with him not too long ago. We're Florida and we expect certain things. ... I did speak to the (SEC) commissioner.
"I wanted to move on and then I saw it and said, 'That's not right.' "
I'm not sure that a half is enough for this, but from a practical standpoint, I don't know how much it matters. He was never getting suspended for more than one game for it, and I would have expected the general reaction to be "yeah, but it's only against Vandy" regardless. So far under Meyer, no one has been suspended for at least an entire game without being arrested or failing a drug test.
According to Meyer, Spikes says he was just retaliating for having his own eyes gouged earlier in the game. I have not yet watched the telecast and my seat at the game was about five rows below the clouds, so I can't say for sure one way or another if that's true. I've seen it reported elsewhere that Spikes was the recipient of some overly physical play, but I can't confirm it first hand.
Spikes is a notorious hothead, but he's not a random cheapshot artist. About the worst he's done sans provocation is whatever that wiggling thing he did to Knowshon Moreno on the second play of the Florida-Georgia game last year (which, while it could qualify as taunting, it is not a cheap shot). For that reason, I would tend to believe on first blush that he really was eye gouged earlier in the game.
Regardless, you can't retaliate and a suspension was warranted. Eye gouging has no place in football, and he deserves to see the bench.