Thanks, Walter and Jeff, for the suggestions.
I was eventually given phone access to the video guy at the arena! Yay! Hooray!
Turns out that they have an After Effects template that they feed the full size content into. It basically cuts the 18K by 40 in half, and stacks the left half above the right half. Thus producing a 9K by 80 file. Good to know, 2 days after the first game…
So they emailed me the template, and all is good.
And QuickTime MOV uncompressed ended up working.
Have a great weekend!