Considering the picks I see top most of the time few of them can actually carry. Short of having a laner with teleport their impact on the outcome of the game is largely irrelevant unless holy shit jax/irelia get 10 kills before you can even /ff and end the farce. Ok apart from zed, but fuck zed he's getting proper nerfs soon(tm). But most of the time you see counterpicks to counterpicks top which fall off late game or even earlier. Top lane is a real mess this season, last season you could at least say it's mostly a bruiser who need farm lane with the occasional mage counterpick. Now it's holy fucking shit I have no idea who is counterpicking what in this meta.
There are the assassins who can't go mid because mid is taken so he goes top (zed's and kha's, sometimes akali) as they can safely farm anyway and maybe get fed in lane, there's whatever as long as it's ranged so they can't go melee or get buttfucked (mostly jayce but also nid, elise, kennen, kayle and teemo), then there are the tanks like Singed, Malphite and Cho which mostly do magic damage (although malph can also work as a bruiser after you get him his tanky shit, so can cho theoretically although not as good), also rumble goes there because he's a lane bully and the recent FotM nunu who's also a bully. Oh and the other more typical tanky bullies, usually Renekton or Garen, occasionally Darius. Also lee sin, because he stays in lane forever, can push all day and can't be ganked.
If you're lucky you see a Riven, maybe a Jax. Sometimes you see a nasus because the S3 changes and slight buffs made him better (even if his jungle is arguably better). Irelia has been nearly forgotten in a meta where belt stacking makes her true damage meaningless, even if BotrK is quite good on her. But you're unlikely to see her because nearly every damn popular pick top counters the solo top bruiser of old. Or they got nerfed to shit like Olaf was. Jarvan mostly stays in the forest nowadays. Gangplank could possibly make a return as the new items give him some new options and he did get buffs after his massive nerfs, but I don't feel he's as safe as picking jayce or renekton top is.
Either way I don't remember if this was said in this topic or I read it elsewhere, despite disagreeing with it at first I have to say now that top is the worst lane to carry yourself from short of doing teleport ganks bot (as I occasionally do with nasus or singed). Usually the match is decided by midgame, the first proper 3 or 4-man tower push or dragon fight seals the deal if one lane didn't already start feeding like crazy. After that only dumb mistakes (roaming solo into unwarded territory, dumb baron timing) can make you lose if you were winning, more rarely you can get outscaled if the game drags on for too long.
Who decides the outcome of those first tower pushes and dragon fights? Mid and bot lanes with the help of the jungler. You're sitting top farming with the other dolt while the game is being decided elsewhere. Your roaming potential is limited you can only gank one lane, the hardest one to gank due to length, unless you take teleport (but you still risk losing a tower, sometimes a tower for a drake+kills is worth it, sometimes not). Jungling and supporting may be a crapshot because the effects of your work still depend on somebody else, but quite frankly your impact on the game will still be bigger than top's sans teleport.
