The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association, now known as the National Sports Media Association, named Mr. Jackson sportscaster of the year five consecutive times, from 1972 to 1976.

He told The New York Times how the broadcaster Ted Husing had inspired his breezy style, advising him: “Never be afraid to turn a phrase. If you can say something in such a way that’s explanatory, has flavor and people can understand it, try it. If it means quoting Shakespeare or Goethe, do it.’’

He was more partial to the lingo of his native rural South.

Mr. Jackson’s “Whoa, Nellie!” punctuating an exciting play was his best-remembered good ol’ boy touch, though he maintained that he didn’t use it all that often.

He said he had a mule named Pearl while growing up on a Georgia farm but attributed the expression to his great-grandfather Jefferson Davis Robison, who evidently plowed many a field holding the reins of a mule.

“He was a farmer and he was a whistler,” Mr. Jackson told The Los Angeles Times in 2013. “He loved two phrases: ‘Dad gummit’ and the other was ‘Whoa Nellie.’”

Mr. Jackson informally christened the University of Michigan’s cavernous stadium at Ann Arbor “the Big House”; he relished broadcasting the Rose Bowl game, “the granddaddy of ’em all”; and he admired the enormous linemen, who were “the Big Uglies in the trenches.”