After Further Review: Lexi leads American LPGA rally

Each week, GolfChannel.com takes a look back at the week in golf. Here’s what’s weighing on our writers’ minds.

On Lexi Thompson claiming ANOTHER event for the U.S. on the LPGA tour …

Lexi Thompson delivered another title for American women by winning the CME Group Tour Championship Sunday at Tiburon Golf Club. That’s nine for the United States this year.

It’s notable, because for all the grief American women have been getting the last few years, they stepped up big. They equaled the formidable Koreans for most wins on tour this year. The Americans rallied hard at year’s end. They won five of the last eight LPGA events.

They’ve come a long way in two years, when Thompson and Brittany Lang each won once. Those two titles in 2016 were the fewest American wins in a single season in LPGA history. – Randall Mell

On Cameron Champ contending even without the driver …

Cameron Champ came up short Sunday at Sea Island, but his breakthrough fall looks like a harbinger of things to come.

Yes, there was the win in Mississippi that locked up two years of job security. But the long-hitting wunderkind didn’t stop once the Sanderson Farms trophy went on his shelf, closing out the 2018 portion of his season with a T-28 finish and two more top-10s.

The first came amid the cozy confines of Mayakoba, and the second was this week on the Georgian coast. Neither one sticks out as a venue that especially rewards the bomb-and-gouge lifestyle, but Champ’s success at both places shows that the driver is not his only weapon. Expect more of the same in 2019 from one of the Tour’s rising stars. – Will Gray

Even the RSM champ is impressed with Champ …

Although he didn’t win the RSM Classic Cameron Champ put on another clinic and gave golf a glimpse of what the future of the game will look like.

Champ led the field in driving distance at Sea Island Resort, which is no huge surprise but noteworthy because he largely hit long irons and fairway woods off the tee. He also finished ninth in stroke gained: putting.

“I just spent 36 holes with Cameron Champ, who hits a 3-iron 290 yards off almost every tee and it gets your attention how golf’s changing,” said Charles Howell III, who won the RSM Classic on the second playoff hole. “Every time one of these guys comes out like that, there seems another and another and another.”  – Rex Hoggard