You really can’t have too many backlinks. Depending on where the backlinks were coming from, they may have been de-valued. What can hurt your site the most is linking out to banned sites and having duplicate content, both big no-no’s to Google.
As for your question on having a footer link here at CAP repeated 800+ times…that won’t cause any issues with Google. They pretty much look at the 800 or so links and count it as 1 link.