Wren quarterback Jacob Owings, like his high school football teammates Oct. 23 in the wild celebration of a Region 2-3A championship, made sure to be extra careful around running back Josiah Mosley.
Mosley, on crutches with a torn ACL suffered the previous week, has been key for the Hurricanes' success as the second-leading rusher with 10 touchdowns and averaging 11.7 per carry.
With Mosely out, Wren will need to rely even more on the arm of Owings. He showed why that should not be a problem as he passed for three touchdowns in a 41-21 win against Belton-Honea Path. Owings also ran for a TD.
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Wren (9-1, 4-0) wrapped up the Region 1-3A championship and finished its regular season. The Hurricanes will have an open date in Week 11. Back-to-back state finalist Belton-Honea Path (5-3, 2-1) will finish Oct. 30 at Emerald.
Wren still has powerful all-state running back Muntu Brown, but missed the speed aspect of Mosley in the ground game. Belton-Honea Path was able to bottle up Brown for most of the night.
"Yeah, we missed JoJo (Mosley)," Owings said. "We run the ball with Muntu a lot and it's easy to expect that. Teams are putting more people in the box. That just kind of opens things up for some more passing. There's more space in the secondary."
Owings has 20 touchdown passes and only two interceptions. The second was by Belton-Honea Path's Amire Rosemond and returned for the Bears' first touchdown. Owings was still trying to forget about that play when the Hurricanes fell behind, 20-14.
He finished with a pair of touchdown passes to Caiden Hill and one to Jack Hughes.
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"Super proud of him because he fought through some adversity," Wren coach Anthony Frate said. "After the interception, we talked about the (defensive) coverage and he looked at me and said, 'OK, that's a problem.' It was all good and I didn't really check in with him after that.
"He's a little bit of a gunslinger, you know, but if makes only two mistakes all season, we'll certainly take it. He's a great player."
Brown came into the game with 744 rushing yards on 124 carries, while Mosley had 587 on just 50 carries. He was a key defensive player as well.
"You can't replace Josiah," Frate said. "He's a great football player. But we'll do our best and try to work without him. We have other guys who can help carry the load he had."
Todd Shanesy covers high school athletics for the Greenville News, Spartanburg Herald-Journal and Anderson Independent Mail in the USA TODAY Network. Contact him by email at todd.shanesy@shj.com. Follow him on X, formerly called Twitter, at @ToddShanesySHJ.
This article originally appeared on Greenville News: How Wren football won region title relying more on QB Jacob Owings