“These words are too often used inappropriately when talking sports personalities in general,” he said. “It is appropriate to use when talking about John Madden.”
Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City quarterback, simply called him a “legend.”
Sports journalists and broadcasters reflected on the role that Mr. Madden played in shaping their lives and careers. John Clark, an NBC sports reporter in Philadelphia, said that, for him, Mr. Madden was “the soundtrack of the NFL.”
“When I started covering the Eagles, and we would go to road games, and see the Madden cruiser out in front of the stadium,” he wrote on Twitter, referring to the vehicle he traveled in to avoid using airplanes, “we knew it was a big one.”
Mr. Madden’s legacy, many said, extended beyond football and broadcasting and reached into the video-gaming world, where generations of gamers grew up on Madden N.F.L., a multibillion-dollar staple for Electronic Arts.
Julian Rignall, a gaming journalist known as Jaz, wrote that Mr. Madden’s video game series “basically enabled me to learn, understand, and ultimately fall in love with the sport of American football.”