In fairness to Brady and Fran, it isn't like this was a situation where Fran was all enamored with Brady and he was some 2* scrub with no offers. He had legit offers from Missouri, Utah, Dayton, and a bunch of mid-majors.
Need to remember how all of this went down. The bigger thing as we have discussed over and over is offering Ellingson was seen as the way to get his much higher recruited AAU teammate Riley LaChance.
Tyler Ulis committed to Kentucky on Sept. 14th leaving Fran holding his dick. Fran tried to scramble and grab another point guard and LaChance was still on the market. They got Ellingson to visit on Sept. 20th and he committed on Sept. 25th. LaChance set his final official visit to Iowa a couple days later on Sept. 27th as he had already visited Vanderbilt, Michigan State and Minnesota. Recruiting analysts thought he was in the bag for Iowa at that point and looked like it was going to work out well, but then he had a change of heart and committed to Vanderbilt.
That left Iowa without Ulis, without LaChance and only Ellingson. Didn't seem too horrible at the time as he was considered one of the best shooters in the class.