A tiny crowd, in an airplane hangar, on an island ... what gives?

This Minnesota-Louisville game in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, is the third in the five-year Armed Forces Classic series that has previously featured big-time college basketball matchups in Germany and South Korea. The series is sponsored by ESPN and this unusual sporting event partner: the Department of Defense.

This isn't a big-crowd event; far from it, actually. The game will be played in front of about 1,400 U.S. military members inside an airplane hangar that has little room for anyone else.

No air conditioning in that hangar, by the way, and the Puerto Rico temps could hit 90 on Friday.

The teams flew to the island together from Louisville, and they attended a Coast Guard demonstration on the beach at U.S. Air Base Borinquen on Thursday.

"I think when we get down there, for anyone that comes there, they're going to realize how cool this whole being on a Coast Guard base, doing it for the Armed Forces," Gophers coach Richard Pitino said Tuesday. "That part of it we're really excited about."

Next year's Armed Forces Classic will be on a U.S. Marine base outside of the U.S., and the 2016 event will be a doubleheader at Pearl Harbor, less than a month before the 75th anniversary of the attack on the Honolulu base.

Amelia Rayno