Read the 3rd and 4th to the last paragraphs. It’s the key. I bold-faced the absolute biggest point here.

A potentially bigger issue might involve what are known as “back-end provisions.” These are contract terms that address what happens to the broadcast rights at the end of the agreement. For a team owner, the best terms would allow the team to take its games and shop them to the highest bidder when the contract expired. The station would prefer a right of first refusal or some other way to hold on to the games without getting into a bidding war.

“How the back-end provisions read is critical to whether there’s a big bump up in long-term revenue or not,” the banking source said.

Ricketts would want to have the control of how the team can auction-off the TV and radio rights. If they’re hooked into ‘GN (as much as many of us would want the Cubs to have all 162 games on ’GN) with ’GNs right of first refusal, it could put a serious limit on how much revenue can be generated by the Cubs’ broadcasts. Unfortunately its all about running a business.

Actually I do believe Ricketts did check this out before. He made a good-faith estimate in the media’s value when he placed his bid. But of course the key to the whole thing is still Zell. Think about when the team went on the block; April, 2007. No one knew the magnitude of what was going to happen but anyone in the business world knew what the housing market was going to do in general, and the banks followed that up with the mortgage mess. If Zell were not so greedy – and this was more than a year before we all first heard of Bear Stearns failure – the deal would have been done long ago. Financing for Ricketts would not have been at the stale-mate it has been and we’d be already more than a year into a new ownership.