Could I make a 28-300mm 3.5-6.3 lens work for night football photography?

I can't really afford a fancy 2.8 lens right now but I can afford this lens I mentioned. I'm looking for something to use besides my 18-105mm standard lens that came with my Nikon D90 to shoot night football. The field is dimly lit with stadium lights & I have already shot with the 18-105mm lens I have but didn't get great results. What settings would be ideal when using a 28-300mm 3.5-6.3 lens? Could I somehow get decent shots with this lens?

At f/6.3 (Not a standard Nikkor aperture at the end of a 28-300 mm lens. It has a f/5.6 aperture at 300 mm) under the lighting I see at the football fields I shot, would require a shutter speed of only 1/200th second which will capture a lot of blurred motion of the players, even with the ISO set to 3200

Here is a shot I took using a 300 mm f/2.8 with a D300 at 1/800th second.

What I would do is shoot with your camera set to Hi-1 (6400 ISO) and take some test shots at 1/500th second and see how underexposed the images are. You can always remove some noise using Lightroom 3's noise reduction, but you can't remove blur

You really need a lens that is has a maximum aperture that is NO smaller than f/4

The Nikkor 200-400 mm lens would be an excellent choice, but it costs as much as the 300 f/2.8

Shoot RAW + JPEG and when processing the RAW files in Lightroom 3, use the noise reduction to its max. Also look for the NR options on the D90. You may find both a high ISO NR option as well as a long exposure NR option. Try them both and see which of them helps reduce image noise at 6400 ISO

Until you can come up with around $6, 500, you will not be able to easily shoot night football.

You've gotten good answers here. That lens is what's called a consumer super-zoom. It's slow and you'll get a lot of flare if you're not very careful.

My advice would be to get the best lens you can afford, and avoid ones with huge zoom ranges. Get as close as you can to the action. You'll have to push your camera's gain (iso), do a little cropping, and worry about the noise later.

You're still going to have problems with motion blur, but a monopod will help you make sure the blur isn't coming from camera movement.

Not really… Although the D-90 has got decent sensitivity. You want to set the ISO to 1600, if not higher. It's your only hope, and your pics will be grainy. Be sure to shoot in RAW.
Check out this site, he shoots high school football with the D-300, and uses a 70-200mm 2.8

http://www.cardensmith.com/Dolgeville-Football/2010-Season/Dolgeville-14-Onandaga-0/14012836_Gmoez#1030898838_VZ2Ri

You can also rent lenses inexpensively for special shoots…