Tarkanian’s Decision Is Made : * College basketball: Announcement to come today on UNLV coach’s future. He reportedly will remain one more season before stepping down.

Nevada Las Vegas basketball Coach Jerry Tarkanian and UNLV President Robert Maxson said Thursday that they have reached an agreement on Tarkanian’s future at the school.

Terms of the agreement will be announced at a news conference on the UNLV campus today, they said.

The Las Vegas Sun, citing unnamed sources, reported Thursday that Tarkanian, who has two years remaining on his contract, will coach at UNLV through the 1991-92 season and then leave the school.

According to the newspaper, the university will not be required to buy out the final year of Tarkanian’s contract, through which he earns more than $400,000 a year in base salary and complimentary tickets to UNLV basketball games.

The Sun--for which Tarkanian and his wife, Lois, both write columns--reported that Tarkanian is said to have offers of front-office jobs with the Clippers or the Dallas Mavericks waiting for him when he leaves UNLV.

UNLV officials, citing orders from Maxson, declined to comment on the report.

Tarkanian and Maxson emerged from a 30-minute meeting in Maxson’s office Thursday and announced that they had reached an agreement “in principle” as to how Tarkanian’s job status will be dealt with.

They declined, however, to discuss the agreement before today’s news conference.

Tarkanian said he knew “pretty much” what course of action he wanted to take after he had met with Maxson for an hour and a half Wednesday.

“And nothing’s changed,” he said after Thursday’s meeting. “We are in total agreement in what we think is best.”

Said Maxson: “Let me tell you that the things Coach Tarkanian presented to me are totally acceptable.”

Tarkanian’s future has been up in the air since he and his lawyers met for five hours with Maxson and members of the University of Nevada System Board of Regents to discuss the UNLV basketball program Monday. Board members would say little after the executive session except to reiterate that Maxson was empowered to deal with Tarkanian’s job status as he saw fit.

Tarkanian, who turns 61 in August, has spent 18 years at UNLV, where he has built a 483-103 record. The Rebels won the national championship in 1990 and lost in the national semifinals to Duke in 1991 after compiling an unbeaten record during the regular season.

But Tarkanian’s program, long the subject of controversy, has been rocked the last few months by negative publicity on an almost weekly basis.

Perhaps the most telling report came May 26 when the Las Vegas Review-Journal published photographs of former UNLV players Moses Scurry, David Butler and Anderson Hunt in the company of convicted sports fixer Richard Perry.

The photos reportedly were taken near the start of the 1989-90 season, after Tarkanian was said to have told his players to stay away from Perry.

In addition, UNLV recently responded to an official letter of inquiry from the NCAA outlining 29 areas of alleged rules violations, many centering on UNLV’s recruitment of former New York high school star Lloyd Daniels in 1986 and ’87.

The case will probably be heard by the NCAA Committee on Infractions in late summer.

Tarkanian, who fought the NCAA in court for 13 years, has said on several occasions that he wants to stay on as UNLV coach until the NCAA investigation is resolved--a notion that lends credence to the idea that he will coach the Rebels one more season.