On a day when a statue of the former football coach Joe Paterno was removed from outside Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, the N.C.A.A. announced Sunday that it would punish the university’s football program in the wake of a child sexual abuse scandal involving the former assistant Jerry Sandusky.

The university is bracing for what the N.C.A.A. is calling “corrective and punitive measures” that are expected to handicap the football program for years. While the specific findings will be released at a news conference at N.C.A.A. headquarters in Indianapolis on Monday morning, a person briefed on the sanctions said that the N.C.A.A. would issue a postseason bowl ban, a number of scholarship reductions and a stiff financial penalty. It is also expected that players in the program will have the freedom to transfer, essentially creating free agency for other programs to approach them.

The N.C.A.A. board of directors’ decision to go outside its usual process for dealing with infractions, forgoing a long investigation, and authorize sanctions based on the findings of an outside investigation is considered unprecedented. It is a pivotal moment in the presidency of Mark Emmert, whose two-year tenure had been characterized by the N.C.A.A.’s seeming lack of enforcement power in a long stream of rules-violation cases and the chaos of conference realignment.

“In a sense, moving out of that model is moving into a new world,” said Josephine R. Potuto, a law professor at the University of Nebraska and a former chairwoman of the N.C.A.A. Committee on Infractions.