The Senate on Monday voted to pass the Protect College Sports Act, marking a milestone in the joint effort between Congress and the NCAA to address chaos and uncertainty in the industry with new federal regulations on athlete payments, transfers and eligibility requirements.

In a closely watched 77-22 vote, the Senate approved the legislation along wide bipartisan margins. It’s now headed to the House for debate.

The act aims to impose some order on college athletics in what supporters of the bill have called an “era of chaos” defined by record-high athlete payments, nearly unrestricted transfers between schools and a patchwork of lawsuits over athlete eligibility. The bill would create a national set of rules to govern name, image and likeness payments to college athletes and would designate the NCAA as the primary enforcer of those new standards.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican sponsor of the PCSA, and Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, the Democratic sponsor, have pitched the legislation as a means of securing federal protections for student athletes, reining in runaway spending on athletic programs and athletes and an attempt to even the playing field between major athletic conferences and their less-wealthy counterparts.

“We’re not going to let the most powerful and richest conferences dictate to the rest of America what’s going to happen to 500,000 athletes,” Cantwell said following a June hearing on the bill.

The new bill would allow schools to establish caps on how much they can pay athletes and would limit players’ eligibility to five years, beginning the year they turn 19 or the year they graduate from high school, thereby preventing athletes from competing in collegiate sports into their late 20s.

The bill would also limit the number of times athletes can transfer schools. The legislation allows for one penalty-free transfer per college career, after which athletes would be forced to sit out a season. And the bill proposes a limit of 5% on the amount a sports agent can take from a college athlete’s endorsement deal or player contract.

Opponents have taken issue with a provision of the bill that would give the NCAA an antitrust exemption to protect the organization from future legal challenges over the enforcement of the rules. Labor unions and some college athletes have argued the arrangement is unfair because the bill limits athletes ability to make money and does not give them collective bargaining power to negotiate the rules under which they will have to play.

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