why was jonah austin only 3 star

He's a project.

See: Josh Williford

Of all the positions, I pay the least attention to OL rankings.

It is very difficult to tell how a person of that size will transition to college football.IMHO harder than most other positions.

Garrett Wibel was a four star back in the day. He was terrible. Meanwhile nobody wanted Josh Willford.

They almost all redshirt and it takes a lot of work for them to either gain or lose weight in order to become a college athlete.

With the exception of a few guys who are usually in the Top 10 in the nation (like a Andre Smith at Bama or Henderson last year), the rest of the HS lineman are very much a crap shoot.

is he really missing a finger or two?

the guy is a project so 3* is probably right

I find it kind of funny that size is a negative factor for him when Rivals seems to place so much importance on it, putting guys who are clearly unpolished and not immediate impact guys as five stars purely because of their physical attributes.

All 5 of our OL guys will RS (except La'el) and 3 of them will go on to become contributors and eventual starters. One will be an attrition guy for some reason or another, just law of averages.

is that trick photography like used on michael clark duncan or is austin really 6'11 425 lbs? if thats trai turner and he really is 6'4" 340, austin sure looks alot bigger than his listed size.

76 Turner, Trai OL 2011 6-4 330
77 Austin, Jonah OL 2011 6-7 355


From the NOLA

LINK

Austin is also not standing side by side with Turner in that pic. So he does appear a little taller then he really is but the dudes massive!

i watched him play and i agree with his 3 star rating

Jonah being in the foreground of the picture skews the perspective a bit.