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Actually, he was well down the list, which had been headed by businessman Malcolm Glazer, then Emmis Communications founder Jeff Smulyan, then real estate magnate Alan Casden - and then McCourt. Unfortunately, Glazer also owned the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the NFL got all huffy about the way he was planning to finance the Dodger purchase (a reminder of how intrusive the league is likely to be if football ever returns to L.A.). From the Biz of Baseball:
The NFL has rules stating that if you’re going to purchase a club in another league, you can’t use NFL assets as collateral to get loans to make the purchase. The NFL also requires that you have an independent management team in place for the club outside the NFL. Glazer had been trying since April of 2002 to make both happen, and couldn’t. One idea on the management side was to have his son Ed, who lived in Los Angeles, run the Dodgers. That didn’t fly well with MLB. As one executive put it, they were concerned with Ed’s "management credentials." "We'd love it to be moving more quickly," a News Corp. executive said to the LA Times regarding the negotiations, "but it's not."
News Corp., which had been looking to unload the team, was getting impatient. Which is when, unfortunately, McCourt's name came into the picture:
If there were a point where MLB could have stepped in and tried to put a foot down, it could have been when they heard McCourt had a liquidity problem – everything was tied up in property – and the purchase would be highly leveraged, so much so that it would be in violation of the league’s debt service rule. As it does now, the problem for the league is one of stopping sales transactions unless they are exceptionally fragile. With News Corp it was a delicate balancing act. They wanted out, and had been for some time. They were impatient as the Glazer deal had floundered. They were the league’s national broadcast partner through Fox. They were now pushing for McCourt.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda....