Most people would admit that they have never seen as many visiting fans in attendance as we saw Saturday. But what was the real Tn attendance figure ? It depends on what or who you want to believe I guess. There are people like Herbstreit who say it's 40,000 and folks who say it's under 10K. 

To try to answer the question, I tried a more objective method. Below is Bubba's unscientific attendance analysis:

I am into geek stuff like amateur astronomy and astrophotography and have a digital imaging package which can analyze digital CCD signatures. I thought this would be an interesting test to get more experience with the tool. The software is very good at analyzing relative pixel density in any given spectral image.

I used photos and videos I took at the game as well as a few I snatched online for the East Zones where I was seated and did not have a clear view. A filter mask was applied to not include any contributions from symmetric areas including solid shapes. This ignores signs, banners etc. 

Below is a pixel map of the West lower deck that displays all orange-yellow hues I defined within a certain cutoff. Doing the same with scarlet-red hues allows the software to compute a relative percentage contribution for each range within an image.

Based on this analysis, the most densely populated area for Orange pixels was the lower deck region around the flagpole extending to the North Endzone. The computed relative population of orange-hued pixels to red-hued is 27%.

Below are the results I obtained for relative orange pixel population percentages using the same analysis of each region - 

Student Bleachers North:  3%
West Upper Deck to mid-bowl South:  18% 
West Lower Deck to mid-bowl South:  27%
East Upper Deck to mid-bowl South:  9%
East Lower Deck to mid-bowl South:  7%

Obtaining the total count requires knowing how many seats are in each of the above sections. I proceeded with the assumption that both east and west contained the same number of seats. I have no idea how many seats exist in the student bleachers North so made a guesstimate as to the seats in this section as a percentage of the total stadium capacity.

The final totally unscientific guestimate of total percentage is ~14-17%, which when assuming the attendance was actually 102,000 would make the Vol attendance figure to be:

14,280 - 17,340