In this paper, we give upper and lower bounds for the spectral radius of a nonnegative irreducible matrix and characterize the equality cases. These bounds theoretically improve and generalize some known results of Duan et al.[X. Duan, B. Zhou, Sharp bounds on the spectral radius of a nonnegative matrix, Linear Algebra Appl. ( 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.laa.2013.08.026]. Finally, applying these bounds to various matrices associated with a graph, we obtain some new upper and lower bounds on various spectral radiuses of graphs, which generalize and improve some known results.