Seventy-seven senators agreed on something Monday. Twenty-two did not. In the current Senate, that is a landslide, the kind of number usually reserved for naming a post office.

The Protect College Sports Act passed the chamber 77-22. It is a federal bill aimed at reshaping the industry, and it took a step toward becoming law, which is careful language for "not there yet." Ted Cruz spoke for it. The bill still needs to clear the rest of Washington.

Here is the structural fact the Saturday crowd never sees. College football, the sport that fills stadiums from Nashville to Austin, has been governed for years by whoever won the most recent court ruling. Rules arrived by injunction. Rosters were built by improvisation. A federal statute is the first serious attempt to say who decides what, and it comes from a Senate that cannot agree on lunch.

Trace the capital. Every school, every conference and every television partner in the sport has been pricing risk without a rulebook. A law, whatever its final shape, replaces guesswork with a schedule of costs. Accountants love that. Coaches with a transfer portal in one hand and a lawyer in the other will get to read the fine print.

The picture across the Atlantic is the same. Manchester City have been found guilty of financial breaches, and Mauricio Pochettino's verdict on the whole saga was that it is "impossible to turn back time." Football and college sport are reaching the same conclusion at once: the money got there first, and the rules are catching up in the dark.

Seventy-seven votes is a mandate for someone to finally hold the pen. Whoever gets it will find the ink has been drying on the old arrangement for years.