What comes to mind if I say "It's a near miss"? ——— I don't know, it's just a turn of phrase, if we started digging into the grammar/structure of every turn of phrase, well that's a fool's errand... also it's actually correct - miss is the subject... this sentence explicitly states it was a miss, near isn't even truly necessary here, it functions as an adjective/modifier for miss: a miss that was near, the objects missed, but were near each other, thank you for coming to my TED talk