The Mysteries of the Airline Industry

I'm looking for flights from OKC to Denver for spring break. Heidi wants to stay up there with her parents for the entire week, so she and the kids will drive up, and I will fly up one-way later in the week and stay through the weekend. Then we'll drive home together. So I got on good ol' Southwest and looked at their flights for the timeframe I'm thinking of flying. Here's what I found...see if you can spot anything funny:



So let me get this straight: I can leave later in the day for a nonstop flight, OR I can take a flight with a stopover that leaves earlier in the day, takes an 1 hour and 45 minutes longer, costs $26 more AND only gets me there 20 minutes earlier??? I'm sure that there's some highly-advanced computer algorithm that looks at flight trends, travel trends, fuel costs, etc., etc. ad nauseum to figure out fares, but did anyone in Southwest's fares department think to check what the computer was doing with these fares before they posted them?