One of the problems you might have is re-cropping the image to a larger size. I know at most night football games here in Seattle we shoot at ISO 800-1000, which gives us a shutter speed of 500th at 2.8 using the 70-200mm, 300mm and 400mm f2.8 lenses. And we don't use any noise reduction in the camera either. Most of our camera menu settings are geared to what Sport Illustrated photographers use. A ton of info an be found here:
sports illustrated camera settings - Google Search