[CaptainJSparrow]

Yes Bill, Matt Cutts has said that being part of a network/link farm will get you penalized by google.

In Google's help area it states:
"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

I think it's pretty obvious that a network of somewhere between 50 to 100 sites, where most of them interlink all of their categories with most of the other sites in that group, could be determined to be a link scheme designed to increase rankings in the serps.

There is no doubt that some form of penalty or flag has been applied to alot of the pages of the sites within this group that we are all discussing. I've already spelled out earlier in this thread how to determine that...matter of fact, I've done it twice in this thread.
Now, we're all trying to determine what caused these penalties...